UTF-8 character not showing properly in tmux

Question

I use ♪ character in my zsh theme's for prompt. But in tmux, my prompt was behaving weirdly, showing extra spaces, like this:

♪ ~   I can type from here
♪ ~ Instead of here like in zsh, and sometimes when I do stuff like cd
♪ ~   cd ~
♪ ~ cdcd /
♪ ~ ^^These 2 chars just show up but are not actually part of command and not delete-able

I recently discovered that I can set tmux encoding to utf8 by set-window-option -g utf8 on. Doing that, the space problem was gone but ♪ character changed to _. How can I get my ♪ back in tmux?

My zsh-theme:

PROMPT='%{$fg_bold[cyan]%} ♪ %{$fg[blue]%}%c%{$fg_bold[blue]%}$(git_prompt_info)$(git_remote_status)%{$fg_bold[blue]%} % %{$reset_color%}'

Solution 1

Starting tmux with u flag solves this issue

tmux -u

I've created an alias of tmux in my zshrc

alias tmux='tmux -u'

Solution 2

Thanks for the flag part, but we can also set the below to the profile rc (e.g. .zshrc or bashrc) file

export LC_ALL=en_IN.UTF-8
export LANG=en_IN.UTF-8

With this option set, no need to use the -u flag.

Comments

[user.dz]

I couldn't get set-window-option to work for me not found cmd. Please, could write exact steps to reproduce it.

[Sourabh]

I used the tmux conf here (its also used here). It looks like tmux is converting every character that is not ASCII into _, when I set that option.

[Dave Amit]

Thanks for the flag! It was so frustrating with all the gibberish when using tmux and nvim would go crazy with powerline! This solved the issue! Thanks again.

[shellbye]

For those who what to know why, check here, -u flag explicitly informs tmux that UTF-8 is supported

[Tim Visee]

Interesting. I thought setting set -g utf8 on in ~/.tmux.conf would solve this issue, but apparently it didn't. Using the flag explicitly when calling tmux does works though. Thanks a lot, you saved me a lot of hassle!

[Ehsan Kia]

For what it's worth, this recently broke for me, turns out it was due to me adding LC_ALL=C to my config, which forced ascii encoding.

[Yesh]

This works only if pasted above source $ZSH/oh-my-zsh.sh