Re: [Help-bash] How to make man display ascii only on rxvt

[David Niklas]

On Fri, 29 Jul 2016 13:54:43 <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 11:47:32PM -0400, address@hidden wrote:
> > On Fri, 22 Jul 2016 07:59:57 <address@hidden> wrote:  
> > > What is your current locale?  (Post the output of "locale".)  
> > LANG=en_US.utf8
> > LC_CTYPE="en_US.utf8"
> > LC_NUMERIC="en_US.utf8"
> > LC_TIME="en_US.utf8"
> > LC_COLLATE="C"
> > LC_MONETARY="en_US.utf8"
> > LC_MESSAGES="en_US.utf8"
> > LC_PAPER="en_US.utf8"
> > LC_NAME="en_US.utf8"
> > LC_ADDRESS="en_US.utf8"
> > LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.utf8"
> > LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.utf8"
> > LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.utf8"
> > LC_ALL=
> > 
> > I acutally purposefully set it this way since everything is going utf8
> > and I got sick of having all these strange chars onscreen.
> > It's also recommended in the Gentoo handbook (my system is Gentoo).  
> 
> You're requesting the utf8 encoding.  Which is fine and appropriate on
> current Linux-based systems.
I though so :)

> > > Which rxvt are you using?  If your locale is using a utf8 encoding,
> > > then you should probably be using rxvt-unicode (a.k.a. urxvt).  The
> > > traditional rxvt is suitable for single-byte encodings like
> > > iso88591.  
> > Shouldn't a terminal program check the terminal type? It's set to rxvt
> > and rxvt does not use utf8.  
> 
> No.  The terminal type ($TERM) has no direct impact on the character
> encoding ($LANG et al.).
> 
> Since you are requesting the utf8 encoding in your locale, you must use
> a terminal that can handle utf8 characters.  Contrariwise, if you are
> using a terminal that can only handle iso88591 characters, you should
> use an iso88591 encoding.
I just overestimate a program smarts.

> > It will, but I wanted to make it so that man would work with non-utf
> > aware terminals, namely: my ttys.  
> 
> By "my ttys" do you mean the Linux console?  The Linux console in Debian
> 8 definitely supports UTF-8 characters.  I don't really understand the
> internals of this, nor do I know how Gentoo's kernel may differ.
Yes, I do mean the actual linux console. I failed to mention, and this is
a little strange, I'm running screen on top of the linux console and it
is screen which is causing the problem.
Ah, if I restart screen with a new locale setting it works correctly!
OK, that part of my problem is solved.
Now I need to ask the screen folks if there is a way to hot change this
so that I don't have to reopen all my work again.

> > I need a better setting, though. lynx (which I love), often displays
> > chars that come out as garbage on my ttys in spite of my locale
> > setting.  
> 
> You must match the locale encoding to the TERMINAL's capabilties.  You
> might be able to GUESS these from the $TERM variable on a specific set
> of systems (e.g. all the systems to which you ever log in), but it is
> not a simple problem in the general case.
With the locale set to C, lynx displays the ^A (caret over A), followed
by the copyright symbol for the copyright symbol in rxvt. Can you make an
educated guess on how to set the locale for lynx to skip the ^A?


Gentoo uses eselect to change the locale, is there a program which will
do this for me or run a shell script with different locale settings then
am currently using?