Arch Linux

jdreiband

Member

Registered: 2020-04-25

Posts: 1

Terminals don't render Greek characters correctly/at all

Regardless of terminal used (I've tried xterm, alacritty, urxvt, and a few others) and regardless of font used (I've tried many which support Greek characters), none of my terminals display Greek fonts. Some of them spit out gibberish like "<ffffffff>", others show absolutely nothing. Only GUI applications display them correctly. Here's the output of locale & locale -a if that matters:

$ locale
LANG=C
LC_CTYPE=C
LC_NUMERIC="C"
LC_TIME="C"
LC_COLLATE="C"
LC_MONETARY="C"
LC_MESSAGES="C"
LC_PAPER="C"
LC_NAME="C"
LC_ADDRESS="C"
LC_TELEPHONE="C"
LC_MEASUREMENT="C"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="C"
LC_ALL=
$ locale -a
C
POSIX
en_US.utf8

Any ideas?

Ropid

Member

Registered: 2015-03-09

Posts: 1,069

Re: Terminals don't render Greek characters correctly/at all

You didn't set up your locale. It shouldn't say "C", it should say something like this:

$ locale
LANG=en_IE.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=en_IE.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC=en_IE.UTF-8
LC_TIME=en_DK.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE=en_IE.UTF-8
LC_MONETARY=en_IE.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES=en_IE.UTF-8
LC_PAPER=en_IE.UTF-8
LC_NAME=en_IE.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=en_IE.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=en_IE.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_IE.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=en_IE.UTF-8
LC_ALL=

You can set things up by running a command like this, then restart:

sudo localectl set-locale en_US.UTF-8

You can also manually do things to /etc/locale.conf. See the ArchWiki "locale" article for more info.

Last edited by Ropid (2020-04-26 05:16:43)