Re: use of graphics characters recently disabled in xterm
Thomas, Thank you very much. I was not aware uxterm and I will look into it. However, to compound the ironies of this situation, I live in Auburn, Alabama. Hurricane Irma blew into town yesterday afternoon. By then, it was not much of a storm any more. My original suspicion was almost right, that it would miss us altogether and get pushed to the east because we had been in a high pressure area with coolish temperatures. But, I suspect, the previous high pressure and cool weather are what did in the hurricane so quickly. But Irma did turn my power off for four hours yesterday by dropping a tree somewhere in the neighborhood, leaving the street without electricity. The computer was on when this happened. And four hours later when it was re-started, the problem we have been discussing had gone away. I do not know how this could be the case because to reboot after an upgrade is supposed to be a Windows thing, not required in Linux except to replace the kernel. With due acknowledgement of the human suffering caused by Irma, it seems that an old saying is justified again. It's an ill wind indeed that blows no one any good. So, let's close this thread for now, and reopen it only if the problem comes back. Cheers, Theodore Kilgore On Tue, 12 Sep 2017, Thomas Dickey wrote: On Mon, Sep 11, 2017 at 11:03:23AM -0500, Theodore Kilgore wrote: Thomas, The output of locale (invoked without arguments) is as follows, between the two lines. kilgota@khayyam:/etc/X11/app-defaults$ locale |less LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8" LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8" LC_COLLATE=C LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8" LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8" LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8" LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8" LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8" LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8" LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8" LC_ALL= --- Those settings should work (the important ones are LC_ALL and LC_CTYPE, LANG). There is a line called "line-drawing characters" which is *not* turned on. It is unclear to me what this does (see the xterm man page for an explanation, which is not totally clear). What it might be doing is turning on the line-drawing characters from X itself, to replace the ones which are provided by the font, or alternatively what it might be doing is enabling the line-drawing characters which are already provided by the font. As I said, the explanation in the man page is not very clear and these two meanings are obviously opposite to each other. In any event, to toggle this setting on and off all by itself, when other settings are not changed, seems to have no effect. There are also lines in that menu for UTF-8 Encoding, UTF-8 Fonts, and UTF-8 Titles. These are also apparently not turned on (no check marks in front). Setting UTF-Encoding *and* UTF-8 Fonts *and* Line-Drawing Characters all to be on seems to solve the problem. But by default all three of them are turned off. Why are all three of these settings turned off by default? I have no Line-Drawing is normally turned off because a well-designed font will look better than xterm's built-in equivalent (since it may use thick lines for large characters). UTF-8 Fonts would be turned on if you used the "uxterm" shell script to setup xterm, which gives better coverage of Unicode. UTF-8 Encoding isn't on either because there's some problem with the locale _tables_ or due to a resource setting. If you have "appres" installed, you may see the problem in the output of "appres XTerm". idea. In particular, this is even more amazing because it seems to be in conflict with the locale settings displayed above. So, in order to get back to the bottom of this problem it seems to me that what needs to be done is to set up a way to turn all three of these settings on. However, I do not know what I am supposed to do in order to carry that out. Change some configuration file, I suppose, or else do a local override. But I suspect that the settings are already set correctly in some file somewhere and that somehow the settings in that file are being ignored. I'd try using the "uxterm" script (it's supposed to do most of the fixes you need). -- Thomas E. Dickeyhttp://invisible-island.net ftp://ftp.invisible-island.net ___ mc mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc
Re: use of graphics characters recently disabled in xterm
On Mon, Sep 11, 2017 at 11:03:23AM -0500, Theodore Kilgore wrote: > > Thomas, > > The output of locale (invoked without arguments) is as follows, > between the two lines. > > > kilgota@khayyam:/etc/X11/app-defaults$ locale |less > LANG=en_US.UTF-8 > LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8" > LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8" > LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8" > LC_COLLATE=C > LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8" > LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8" > LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8" > LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8" > LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8" > LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8" > LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8" > LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8" > LC_ALL= > --- Those settings should work (the important ones are LC_ALL and LC_CTYPE, LANG). > There is a line called "line-drawing characters" which is *not* > turned on. It is unclear to me what this does (see the xterm man > page for an explanation, which is not totally clear). What it might > be doing is turning on the line-drawing characters from X itself, to > replace the ones which are provided by the font, or alternatively > what it might be doing is enabling the line-drawing characters which > are already provided by the font. As I said, the explanation in the > man page is not very clear and these two meanings are obviously > opposite to each other. In any event, to toggle this setting on and > off all by itself, when other settings are not changed, seems to > have no effect. > > There are also lines in that menu for UTF-8 Encoding, UTF-8 Fonts, > and UTF-8 Titles. These are also apparently not turned on (no check > marks in front). > > Setting UTF-Encoding *and* UTF-8 Fonts *and* Line-Drawing Characters > all to be on seems to solve the problem. But by default all three of > them are turned off. > > Why are all three of these settings turned off by default? I have no Line-Drawing is normally turned off because a well-designed font will look better than xterm's built-in equivalent (since it may use thick lines for large characters). UTF-8 Fonts would be turned on if you used the "uxterm" shell script to setup xterm, which gives better coverage of Unicode. UTF-8 Encoding isn't on either because there's some problem with the locale _tables_ or due to a resource setting. If you have "appres" installed, you may see the problem in the output of "appres XTerm". > idea. In particular, this is even more amazing because it seems to > be in conflict with the locale settings displayed above. So, in > order to get back to the bottom of this problem it seems to me that > what needs to be done is to set up a way to turn all three of these > settings on. However, I do not know what I am supposed to do in > order to carry that out. Change some configuration file, I suppose, > or else do a local override. But I suspect that the settings are > already set correctly in some file somewhere and that somehow the > settings in that file are being ignored. I'd try using the "uxterm" script (it's supposed to do most of the fixes you need). -- Thomas E. Dickeyhttp://invisible-island.net ftp://ftp.invisible-island.net signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ mc mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc
Re: use of graphics characters recently disabled in xterm
Am 11.09.2017 um 18:03 schrieb Theodore Kilgore: Thomas, The output of locale (invoked without arguments) is as follows, between the two lines. kilgota@khayyam:/etc/X11/app-defaults$ locale |less LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8" LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8" LC_COLLATE=C LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8" LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8" LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8" LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8" LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8" LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8" LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8" LC_ALL= --- Now, what is also interesting is that after reading closely the man page for xterm and trying to make sense of it, I discovered that there are two things which one can do in order to make the settings in an xterm to be visible. There are two things called "menu" and one can get to them by holding down a control key and clicking either the left or the right mouse button while the pointer is in the window. The right button click displays a window called "VT fonts" and it contains relevant information. Unfortunately, I do not know if it is possible to mouse-copy its contents because it goes away immediately as soon as one lets go of that button. This VT Font menu depicts the current settings by a check mark in front of whichever setting is highlighted. One can scroll down that menu and change a setting by hand, by leaving the highlighting on top of that particular setting and then closing the menu. Also, the settings in this menu are specific to the xterm which has been opened. They remain as they previously were if one opens another xterm next to the one in which the settings have already been set by hand. And in the same manner those settings cannot be saved for another X session. A further description of possibly relevant settings in this window follows. There is a line called "line-drawing characters" which is *not* turned on. It is unclear to me what this does (see the xterm man page for an explanation, which is not totally clear). What it might be doing is turning on the line-drawing characters from X itself, to replace the ones which are provided by the font, or alternatively what it might be doing is enabling the line-drawing characters which are already provided by the font. As I said, the explanation in the man page is not very clear and these two meanings are obviously opposite to each other. In any event, to toggle this setting on and off all by itself, when other settings are not changed, seems to have no effect. There are also lines in that menu for UTF-8 Encoding, UTF-8 Fonts, and UTF-8 Titles. These are also apparently not turned on (no check marks in front). Setting UTF-Encoding *and* UTF-8 Fonts *and* Line-Drawing Characters all to be on seems to solve the problem. But by default all three of them are turned off. Why are all three of these settings turned off by default? I have no idea. In particular, this is even more amazing because it seems to be in conflict with the locale settings displayed above. So, in order to get back to the bottom of this problem it seems to me that what needs to be done is to set up a way to turn all three of these settings on. However, I do not know what I am supposed to do in order to carry that out. Change some configuration file, I suppose, or else do a local override. But I suspect that the settings are already set correctly in some file somewhere and that somehow the settings in that file are being ignored. Theodore Kilgore On Sun, 10 Sep 2017, Thomas Dickey wrote: On Sun, Sep 10, 2017 at 01:58:38PM -0500, Theodore Kilgore wrote: On Sun, 10 Sep 2017, Thomas Dickey wrote: On Fri, Sep 08, 2017 at 05:57:33PM -0500, Theodore Kilgore wrote: I have recently done some upgrades, keeping current with slackware-64-current. And what has happened is that suddenly MC started to print funny characters around the panels instead of a screenshot would help: In the screenshot, I see a single character, which is always the same value: 226 (octal 342). That happens to be the first byte of the UTF-8 encoding for the various line-drawing characters which is odd, since they are all 3-bytes: \342\224\2140x250c/* upper left corner */ \342\224\2240x2514/* lower left corner */ \342\224\2200x2510/* upper right corner */ \342\224\2300x2518/* lower right corner */ \342\224\2340x251c/* tee pointing left */ \342\224\2440x2524/* tee pointing right */ \342\224\2640x2534/* tee pointing up */ \342\224\2540x252c/* tee pointing down */ \342\224\2000x2500/* horizontal line */ \342\224\2020x2502/* vertical line */ \342\224\2740x253c/* large plus or crossover */ Those 22x's are mostly in the C1 control range (200 to 237 octal), so it's possible that xterm is not using UTF-8 encoding, and simply
Re: use of graphics characters recently disabled in xterm
Thomas, The output of locale (invoked without arguments) is as follows, between the two lines. kilgota@khayyam:/etc/X11/app-defaults$ locale |less LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8" LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8" LC_COLLATE=C LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8" LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8" LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8" LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8" LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8" LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8" LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8" LC_ALL= --- Now, what is also interesting is that after reading closely the man page for xterm and trying to make sense of it, I discovered that there are two things which one can do in order to make the settings in an xterm to be visible. There are two things called "menu" and one can get to them by holding down a control key and clicking either the left or the right mouse button while the pointer is in the window. The right button click displays a window called "VT fonts" and it contains relevant information. Unfortunately, I do not know if it is possible to mouse-copy its contents because it goes away immediately as soon as one lets go of that button. This VT Font menu depicts the current settings by a check mark in front of whichever setting is highlighted. One can scroll down that menu and change a setting by hand, by leaving the highlighting on top of that particular setting and then closing the menu. Also, the settings in this menu are specific to the xterm which has been opened. They remain as they previously were if one opens another xterm next to the one in which the settings have already been set by hand. And in the same manner those settings cannot be saved for another X session. A further description of possibly relevant settings in this window follows. There is a line called "line-drawing characters" which is *not* turned on. It is unclear to me what this does (see the xterm man page for an explanation, which is not totally clear). What it might be doing is turning on the line-drawing characters from X itself, to replace the ones which are provided by the font, or alternatively what it might be doing is enabling the line-drawing characters which are already provided by the font. As I said, the explanation in the man page is not very clear and these two meanings are obviously opposite to each other. In any event, to toggle this setting on and off all by itself, when other settings are not changed, seems to have no effect. There are also lines in that menu for UTF-8 Encoding, UTF-8 Fonts, and UTF-8 Titles. These are also apparently not turned on (no check marks in front). Setting UTF-Encoding *and* UTF-8 Fonts *and* Line-Drawing Characters all to be on seems to solve the problem. But by default all three of them are turned off. Why are all three of these settings turned off by default? I have no idea. In particular, this is even more amazing because it seems to be in conflict with the locale settings displayed above. So, in order to get back to the bottom of this problem it seems to me that what needs to be done is to set up a way to turn all three of these settings on. However, I do not know what I am supposed to do in order to carry that out. Change some configuration file, I suppose, or else do a local override. But I suspect that the settings are already set correctly in some file somewhere and that somehow the settings in that file are being ignored. Theodore Kilgore On Sun, 10 Sep 2017, Thomas Dickey wrote: On Sun, Sep 10, 2017 at 01:58:38PM -0500, Theodore Kilgore wrote: On Sun, 10 Sep 2017, Thomas Dickey wrote: On Fri, Sep 08, 2017 at 05:57:33PM -0500, Theodore Kilgore wrote: I have recently done some upgrades, keeping current with slackware-64-current. And what has happened is that suddenly MC started to print funny characters around the panels instead of a screenshot would help: In the screenshot, I see a single character, which is always the same value: 226 (octal 342). That happens to be the first byte of the UTF-8 encoding for the various line-drawing characters which is odd, since they are all 3-bytes: \342\224\2140x250c /* upper left corner */ \342\224\2240x2514 /* lower left corner */ \342\224\2200x2510 /* upper right corner */ \342\224\2300x2518 /* lower right corner */ \342\224\2340x251c /* tee pointing left */ \342\224\2440x2524 /* tee pointing right */ \342\224\2640x2534 /* tee pointing up */ \342\224\2540x252c /* tee pointing down */ \342\224\2000x2500 /* horizontal line */ \342\224\2020x2502 /* vertical line */ \342\224\2740x253c /* large plus or crossover */ Those 22x's are mostly in the C1 control range (200 to 237 octal), so it's possible that xterm is not using UTF-8 encoding,
Re: use of graphics characters recently disabled in xterm
On Sun, Sep 10, 2017 at 01:58:38PM -0500, Theodore Kilgore wrote: > > > On Sun, 10 Sep 2017, Thomas Dickey wrote: > > >On Fri, Sep 08, 2017 at 05:57:33PM -0500, Theodore Kilgore wrote: > >> > >>I have recently done some upgrades, keeping current with > >>slackware-64-current. And what has happened is that suddenly MC > >>started to print funny characters around the panels instead of > > > >a screenshot would help: In the screenshot, I see a single character, which is always the same value: 226 (octal 342). That happens to be the first byte of the UTF-8 encoding for the various line-drawing characters which is odd, since they are all 3-bytes: \342\224\2140x250c /* upper left corner */ \342\224\2240x2514 /* lower left corner */ \342\224\2200x2510 /* upper right corner */ \342\224\2300x2518 /* lower right corner */ \342\224\2340x251c /* tee pointing left */ \342\224\2440x2524 /* tee pointing right */ \342\224\2640x2534 /* tee pointing up */ \342\224\2540x252c /* tee pointing down */ \342\224\2000x2500 /* horizontal line */ \342\224\2020x2502 /* vertical line */ \342\224\2740x253c /* large plus or crossover */ Those 22x's are mostly in the C1 control range (200 to 237 octal), so it's possible that xterm is not using UTF-8 encoding, and simply discarding the control characters (with an occasional glitch for the tee's and plus signs). > Attached. > > > > >+ If it's 2-3 characters rather than a single character, that indicates that > > xterm's not using UTF-8 (a resource problem perhaps). You would set in > > the right-menu-mouse menu that "UTF-8 Encoding" is not checked. > > This could be the problem, even though X is completely up to date > and the file /etc/X11/app-defaults/XTerm does contain the following > lines: > > *fontMenu*utf8-mode*Label: UTF-8 Encoding > *fontMenu*utf8-fonts*Label: UTF-8 Fonts > *fontMenu*utf8-title*Label: UTF-8 Titles > > What is interesting about this is the following. Yesterday evening I > did some experimenting. The xterm man page contains the following > options > > >-lc Turn on support of various encodings according to the > users' >locale setting, i.e., LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, or LANG environment >variables. This is achieved by turning on UTF-8 mode > and by >invoking luit for conversion between locale encodings and >UTF-8. (luit is not invoked in UTF-8 locales.) This >corresponds to the locale resource. > >The actual list of encodings which are supported is > determined >by luit. Consult the luit manual page for further details. > >See also the discussion of the -u8 option which > supports UTF-8 >locales. > >+lc Turn off support of automatic selection of locale > encodings. >Conventional 8bit mode or, in UTF-8 locales or with > -u8 option, >UTF-8 mode will be used. > > > Both of the above options restore MC to sane behavior. That's saying that turning the switch on or off has the same effect :-( > Aksi there is the -u8 option. > >-u8 This option sets the utf8 resource. When utf8 is > set, xterm >interprets incoming data as UTF-8. This sets the wideChars >resource as a side-effect, but the UTF-8 mode set by this >option prevents it from being turned off. If you must turn >UTF-8 encoding on and off, use the -wc option or the >corresponding wideChars resource, rather than the -u8 > option. > >This option and the utf8 resource are overridden by > the -lc and >-en options and locale resource. That is, if xterm > has been >compiled to support luit, and the locale resource is not >false this option is ignored. We recommend using the -lc >option or the locale: true resource in UTF-8 locales when >your operating system supports locale, or -en UTF-8 > option or >the locale: UTF-8 resource when your operating system does >not support locale. > > The option xterm -en UTF-8 works, too, as it is supposed to. I also > tried I tested each one of the above options by opening an xterm and > then typing the command. When I hit "enter" it created a new window > beside the old one, and then opened MC in the new window. > > The option xterm -en UTF-8 works, too, as it is supposed to. I also tried > using "luit" as the sterm man page suggests to do, but that option appears > to be superfluous. > > So, what I could do about this is to associate one of these options > with the command to fire up an xterm in my configuration file for my > window > manager, which is fvwm2. But, alas, I just now tried all of
Re: use of graphics characters recently disabled in xterm
On Fri, Sep 08, 2017 at 05:57:33PM -0500, Theodore Kilgore wrote: > > I have recently done some upgrades, keeping current with > slackware-64-current. And what has happened is that suddenly MC > started to print funny characters around the panels instead of a screenshot would help: + If it's 2-3 characters rather than a single character, that indicates that xterm's not using UTF-8 (a resource problem perhaps). You would set in the right-menu-mouse menu that "UTF-8 Encoding" is not checked. + If it's a single character, then that could be a problem with the video driver (or fontconfig, etc). For this, you could try using xterm's built-in line-drawing using the "Line-Drawing Characters" menu option. > printing vertical and horizontal lines. This happens only in an > xterm, not in the console terminal where all remains OK. The command > mc -a replaces the straight lines with vertical and horizontal > dashes, but that does not look nearly so nice. -- Thomas E. Dickeyhttp://invisible-island.net ftp://ftp.invisible-island.net signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ mc mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc
Re: use of graphics characters recently disabled in xterm
I had this (or something similar) happen some years back probably with Konsole on an Kubuntu installation. Probably AMD cpu also. I cannot remember now what I did to fix. Possibly put the characters into mc.ini. Will On 09/09/17 10:57, Theodore Kilgore wrote: I have recently done some upgrades, keeping current with slackware-64-current. And what has happened is that suddenly MC started to print funny characters around the panels instead of printing vertical and horizontal lines. This happens only in an xterm, not in the console terminal where all remains OK. The command mc -a replaces the straight lines with vertical and horizontal dashes, but that does not look nearly so nice. Oh, I should also say that this happens only on my home machine which has an AMD processor and on-board ATI video. It does not happen on the machine at my office, which is an Intel CPU with on-board Intel graphics. The two machines both run slackware-64-current and as far as I know the two machines have exactly the same list of distro packages installed. The only thing I can think of is that something in the options for xterm needs to be changed, but I have no clue about what that magic option might be. Or, it could possibly be some library which deals with graphics and is somehow broken on an AMD-based machine. I am pretty much guessing, of course, but to fix the problem would be nice. Anyone have an idea? Theodore Kilgore ___ mc mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc ___ mc mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc
Re: use of graphics characters recently disabled in xterm
On Fri, 8 Sep 2017, Theodore Kilgore wrote: The only thing I can think of is that something in the options for xterm needs to be changed, but I have no clue about what that magic option might be. Or, it could possibly be some library which deals with graphics and is somehow broken on an AMD-based machine. I am pretty much guessing, of course, but to fix the problem would be nice. Anyone have an idea? Check your TERM (echo $TERM) variable in xterm. Most probably the slackware switched to xterm-256color or something. Also check the output of "locale" and check the Ctrl-right click menu in xterm for some font settings. Theodore Kilgore Adam Pribyl ___ mc mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc
Re: use of graphics characters recently disabled in xterm
On Fri, 8 Sep 2017, Theodore Kilgore wrote: The only thing I can think of is that something in the options for xterm needs to be changed, but I have no clue about what that magic option might be. Or, it could possibly be some library which deals with graphics and is somehow broken on an AMD-based machine. This must have something to do either with your locale settings, or with fonts that are used by xterm, but certainly not with the graphics libraries or hardware, way too low-level. In any case, the next debugging step that I would recommend is to create a brand new user on your machine, log in as this user in the graphical mode, start xterm and try mc. Depending on the results, decide on what to do next. The new user can be deleted afterwards with no traces left. -- Sincerely yours, Yury V. Zaytsev ___ mc mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc
use of graphics characters recently disabled in xterm
I have recently done some upgrades, keeping current with slackware-64-current. And what has happened is that suddenly MC started to print funny characters around the panels instead of printing vertical and horizontal lines. This happens only in an xterm, not in the console terminal where all remains OK. The command mc -a replaces the straight lines with vertical and horizontal dashes, but that does not look nearly so nice. Oh, I should also say that this happens only on my home machine which has an AMD processor and on-board ATI video. It does not happen on the machine at my office, which is an Intel CPU with on-board Intel graphics. The two machines both run slackware-64-current and as far as I know the two machines have exactly the same list of distro packages installed. The only thing I can think of is that something in the options for xterm needs to be changed, but I have no clue about what that magic option might be. Or, it could possibly be some library which deals with graphics and is somehow broken on an AMD-based machine. I am pretty much guessing, of course, but to fix the problem would be nice. Anyone have an idea? Theodore Kilgore ___ mc mailing list https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc