Subject: screen with irssi, sux.theme, urxvt

From: Andreas Herz <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2008 19:11:59 +0100

Hi,

i have a confusing problem. I have a debian testing system. I use urxvt
on my desktop, then ssh to the server with irssi running in screen. I
also use the sux.theme from the irssi.org page. Now i found out, that in
the bottom line, i have a display disfunction. In the line with "time +
nickname + channelname + Act:", there are ANSI Chars. I have
Questionmarks, what is HTML-Code &#x81; in this ANSI Table:
http://www.torsten-horn.de/techdocs/ascii.htm

But if you look at the sux.theme screenshot on the irssi.org page, they
have squares. So i tried to run irssi in urxvt, there i have no
problems, i can see the squares. Furthermore i checked serveral things.
Both systems, desktop and server, are fully UTF-8, also screen and irssi
itself are set to use UTF-8. Locales are also UTF-8. So i tried to
replave $TERM=screen with $TERM=rxvt-unicode. Nothign changed.

So my guess is, that there is a issue with screen and the display of
ANSI Chars. Do you have any hint for me?

I also made 2 screenshots that i uploaded here:

1. Irssi in screen:

http://web10.syscp.nutime.de/stuff/2.jpg

2. Irssi only in urxvt:

http://web10.syscp.nutime.de/stuff/1.jpg

Thx

Andi

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---

From: Micah Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 01 Nov 2008 10:07:39 -0700

> http://www.torsten-horn.de/techdocs/ascii.htm

&#x81 is not a graphic character, either questionmark or box. It is a
character in the C1 control character set that has _no_ assigned
meaning. Whether it gets displayed at all, and if displayed, how, are
all undefined.

When I run irssi with the sux theme, it's sending 0xB7, which is not a
legal UTF-8 character, and not 0x81 (which also isn't, anyway). 0xB7 in
the latin1 encoding is "middle dot" (probably the "square" you want);
but since you're running in UTF-8 it's a nonsensical byte value.

In gnome-terminal, either inside or outside of screen, 0xB7 is rendered
as a question-mark. In urxvt inside of screen, I get full-character
boxes, rather than question-marks. It's not guaranteed to be rendered in
_any_ particular way, since it's not a meaningful byte value.

It looks like the sux theme assumes a ISO-8859-* encoding, so if you
want it to render properly in screen, you'll need to tell screen that
it's in latin1 rather than UTF-8. For instance, turning _off_ UTF-8 mode
in screen fixed the issue for me.

- --
HTH,
Micah J. Cowan
Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer.
GNU Maintainer: wget, screen, teseq
http://micah.cowan.name/