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I don't understand why unicode is not working in my MinTTY terminal. I am using Windows XP

I have Cygwin v1.7.10 and MinTTY v1.0.3. Am also using the zsh shell (via "oh-my-zsh")

I have set local to "en_US" and the character set to "UTF-8" in the MinTTY settings dialog.

When I am at the MinTTY terminal, this is the output of the following environment variables:

echo $LC_ALL

echo $LC_CTYPE

echo $LANG

Yet when I am viewing files with unicode I can't see the symbols. As well, the default prompt for "oh-my-zsh" uses unicode, and that also is not working.

Does anyone know what could be wrong?

Can anyone confirm that unicode does work on a similar setup?

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What are the symbols you're expecting to see, and what do you get instead? It could be that the font you're using doesn't have glyphs for those symbols, so you could try different fonts. DejaVu Sans Mono has particularly good Unicode coverage. –  ak2 Feb 28 '12 at 14:04
Nothing too out there. For instance the default "oh-my-zsh" prompt looks like this: ➜ ~. But in my mintty terminal the arrow doesn't work, instead I see an empty square. The same for ♭, 𝄪, 𝄫, ♯ which one of my apps use. I tried all of the different fonts available, including DejaVu Sans Mono and Courier New (which should also have good unicode support). It just doesn't make sense why it wouldn't work. –  asgeo1 Feb 28 '12 at 22:23
On Windows 7, ➜, ♭ and ♯ all work for me with the default Lucida Console as well as Courier New and DejaVu Sans Mono. On XP, they only work with DejaVu Sans Mono. The other two didn't work on either machine, but then they didn't work in Firefox either. –  ak2 Mar 5 '12 at 13:23
ps: Try catting this test file to check whether any non-ASCII stuff is working. –  ak2 Mar 5 '12 at 13:27
Thank you ak2. DejaVu Sans Mono is indeed the only font that does work on XP. I thought I had tested it, but I must have made a mistake. Cheers –  asgeo1 Mar 5 '12 at 22:11

2 Answers 2

up vote 4 down vote accepted

With that sort of issue, it's often worth trying a different font, because Unicode coverage varies quite a lot between fonts. The free DejaVu Sans Mono has better coverage than many others.

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My issue was with displaying λ. I had to set "Character set" to UTF-8 in the MinTTY options.

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