How to fix PuTTY showing garbled characters?

Question

Connecting from a Windows 7 PC via SSH to an Ubuntu server using PuTTY, I get some screen errors:

I.e. it:

• "Double-draws" the selection inside Midnight Commander (MC).
• Other characters like line elements are drawn as the wrong characters (e.g. "â" instead of "|").

I connected to the same Ubuntu server with a terminal and SHH from a Mac OS X and do not get these screen garbling (i.e. everything looks and works correctly). I've already tried to play with the font settings inside PuTTY, changing it from Courier New to Consolas but without luck.

My question therefore is:

How to configure PuTTY to correctly display special characters and not double-draw/overwrite screen lines?

Solution 1

You almost certainly have set the wrong character set in your PuTTY settings.

Verify the character set on the remote system by running the command:

locale

This should return something like:

LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

So check your PuTTY settings under Translation and ensure that you have UTF-8 set as the character set.

You may need to tweak the line drawing setting as well, but it is probably not likely.

Solution 2

I had an issue with Debian's aptitude program even though I had UTF-8 as my characters set. What worked for me was to set the 'Connection > Data > 'Terminal-type string' to 'putty' instead of 'xterm' - apparently Putty ignores the character sequence to switch into drawing mode: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/utf8-plus-vt100.html

Solution 3

After 15 years I got annoyed once more and googled around again, found this, chose

change settings → window → translation → remote char set → "use font encoding"

and that fixed it.

Solution 4

Also, if UTF-8 is not properly configured, you may run it as mc -ac.

Credits: http://blog.acsystem.sk/linux/midnight-commander-utf8-line-drawing-characters-problem

Solution 5

Window → Translation → "Enable VT100 line drawing even in UTF-8 mode".

This fixes the display of both mc and wavemon for me.

View more solutions

Comments

[Vunb]

With SecureCRT: Select Options -> Session Options -> Terminal -> Appearence -> Character encoding -> select: UTF-8. Hope help others like me!

[Piotr Jurkiewicz]

This is not sufficient in all cases. You should also export the following variable to your environment: NCURSES_NO_UTF8_ACS=1 [more info]

[Nate]

Excellent. Easy and it works. (At least it does on Debian/Ubuntu.)

[user2693017]

in case locale returns POSIX you probably have usePAM disabled in the sshd config

[koppor]

If the locale returns something like POSIX, issue update-locale LANG=en_US.utf8 at the command line - see thomas-krenn.com/de/wiki/Locales_unter_Ubuntu_konfigurieren

[ADTC]

This works well (on PuTTY) but then it introduces another (more minor) problem: remote-controlled window title changing no longer works.

[Michael Hampton]

You should also mention that you're not connecting to a modern LInux system, but an older non-Linux system.

[alpha_989]

@michael-hampton, my system is configured to use en_US.UTF-8. I see that different places say different things about locale. Some places mention I should use en_US while other places mention I should use de_DE. I saw before the grep and other core utils use the locale to set the character set, I believe. What are the implicaitons of changing this?

[alpha_989]

@koppor, you mentioned about changing locale to en_US, while michael mentioned changing locale to de_DE. Which one is correct?

[alpha_989]

What are the side-effects of changing LANG variable? If you already had C.UTF-8 as LANG, why export it again?

[alpha_989]

Ahh ok, makes sense. Thanks for the explanation @Michael-hompton. Yeah.. I thought so too. But I noticed that you are in NH.. not Germany. So was not sure about whether I should be using that. Anyways, the problem I was having was not related to this, but I figured it out: superuser.com/questions/278286/….

[weberjn]

Excellent. Solved the problem for ncmpc on Ubuntu Artful.

[HeatfanJohn]

export NCURSES_NO_UTF8_ACS=1 worked best for me. I just need to remember to use the -E option on sudo when I run iftop to keep that environment setting. sudo -E iftop

[Martin]

This fixed it for me.

[tehnicaorg]

Yeah, this fixes aptitude, iptraf-ng without breaking mc. (with Terminal type string set to either xterm or xterm-256color). See also superuser.com/questions/278286/…

[tehnicaorg]

NCURSES_NO_UTF8_ACS=1 is not needed anymore. See superuser.com/questions/278286/… on how to enable VT100 drawing characters in PuTTY 0.71+.

[SergeantSerk]

For me, UTF-8 was already set but it didn't work, instead setting it to this did.

[Chupo_cro]

When I set Use font encoding then for example armbian-config characters are OK but they are wrong in Midnight Commander and vice versa - when I set UTF-8 then characters in armbian-config are wrong but in Midnight Commader are OK.

[Mr. Beeblebrox]

THIS is the real answer. If you have it set as UTF8, vt100 line draw does NOT WORK.

[BrentHarsh]

UTF-8 was set for me as well, but it didn't work when I was using "pm2 monit" which updates the screen continuously. Setting "use font encoding" instead fixed that process so I was happy for a few mins. But later on, I used the "pm2 status" command which draws a box on-screen only once... and it was now displaying the garbage characters instead of lines. It's like you can't have both working at the same time. No problem with a plain-old-linux shell terminal though.