Arch Linux

Regata

Member

Registered: 2021-03-05

Posts: 3

Locale language question

Hello everyone,

I installed Arch very recently and it has been a very enjoyable experience. However I am in sort of a conundrum:
For the context, I use a french keyboard and a french keymap (fr-latin1), and I use en_US as my locale language.
With this configuration, the french special characters (like é, ç ...) don't display correctly in the terminal (in vim in particular which is my main text editor) and I get the question mark character as output instead.
If I switch to a french locale, I do get the correct output of those characters, but I don't want to have french as my locale language for multiple reasons (mainly because it's easier to search error messages if they are in english, and I'm used to it)

Is there a way to fix this issue?

my locales:

# locale -a
C
POSIX
ar_MA.utf8
en_US
en_US.iso88591
en_US.utf8
fr_FR.utf8

vconsole.conf content:

# cat /etc/vconsole.conf
KEYMAP=fr-latin1

Last edited by Regata (2021-03-06 08:13:35)

Awebb

Member

Registered: 2010-05-06

Posts: 6,688

Re: Locale language question

Please either post complete locales and not just en_US or post the output of the locale command, as well as the content of your vconsole.conf.

Regata

Member

Registered: 2021-03-05

Posts: 3

Re: Locale language question

Please either post complete locales and not just en_US or post the output of the locale command, as well as the content of your vconsole.conf.

I edited the original post with what you demanded.

emixam

Member

Registered: 2021-03-06

Posts: 1

Re: Locale language question

Hello Regata,

I have more or less the same configuration except that my locale is en_GB.utf8 and my keyboard layout is fr-pc. And I don't have this problem. So I think it's a configuration problem.

Did you generate your locales with the locale-gen command?
And what do you have in your /etc/locale.conf? You should have LANG=en_US.UTF-8.

Regards,
Max.

Awebb

Member

Registered: 2010-05-06

Posts: 6,688

Re: Locale language question

For good measure, also view and probably post the output of "locale" without any switches.

I've googled a bit and it seems to be a common problem. I haven't found a solution, but I was only looking for the problem.

philo

Member

Registered: 2015-01-26

Posts: 275

Re: Locale language question

You have:

# cat /etc/vconsole.conf
KEYMAP=fr-latin1

What works for me:

KEYMAP=fr

Last edited by philo (2021-03-06 13:08:29)

Regata

Member

Registered: 2021-03-05

Posts: 3

Re: Locale language question

Hello everyone,

Thank you for all your replies, it seems like I just was unlucky in my choice of terminal and probably fonts (I started in urxvt then switched to st and both had that problem, and I tried a lot of fonts in the process), I switched to alacritty and it seems to work fine, there is still some weird behavior happening when backspacing those characters: I have to backspace twice to delete the special characters for the terminal but the second backspace impedes on the character  before the special character which looks like it was deleted but it's actually not. But to be fair it's not too big of a deal, I'll live with it.

Ferdinand

Member

From: Norway

Registered: 2020-01-02

Posts: 338

Re: Locale language question

Just in case you decide to investigate any further... try to enable debug output from udev and boot.
Then check journalctl | grep vconsole to see if you have any errors from vconsole.

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