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

[doark]

On Fri, 22 Jul 2016 07:59:57 <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 21, 2016 at 06:03:52PM -0400, David Niklas wrote:
> > It seems that my version of rxvt can't handle whatever encoding man
> > gives it. So I do man -E ascii , but if I was using another terminal
> > type (like the plain linux tty), then I would not need that argument.
> > I tried to create a function that makes an alias for the man program,
> > but that failed.  
> 
> Sounds more like an operating system support question, but we can
> try to help.
> 
> 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).

> 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.

> Are there multiple systems involved?  E.g. are you logging directly
> into a legacy Unix workstation and then using ssh to login to a modern
> Linux system, and then running man on the Linux system?  If you have a
> setup like this, with multiple conflicting encodings, then things will
> become more complex -- but you would definitely need to *know* this and
> reveal it because it would be an important component of the problem.
No

> However, I give it about a 2/3 chance that using urxvt instead of rxvt
> will solve the issue.
It will, but I wanted to make it so that man would work with non-utf
aware terminals, namely: my ttys.


Now rxvt and my ttys work correctly.

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.
The info program really does not seem to care either way. Some programs
(like equery, part of my PM), must have utf8 as the locale, whereas
others either recommend C (like postgresql), or require it (like a bunch
of shell scripts).

Thanks,
David