Unicode with Cygwin and MinTTY not working

Question

I don't understand why unicode is not working in my MinTTY terminal. I am using Windows XP

I have Cygwin v1.7.10 and MinTTY v1.0.3. Am also using the zsh shell (via "oh-my-zsh")

I have set local to "en_US" and the character set to "UTF-8" in the MinTTY settings dialog.

When I am at the MinTTY terminal, this is the output of the following environment variables:

echo $LC_ALL
*nothing*

echo $LC_CTYPE
en_US.UTF-8

echo $LANG
en_US.UTF-8

Yet when I am viewing files with unicode I can't see the symbols. As well, the default prompt for "oh-my-zsh" uses unicode, and that also is not working.

Does anyone know what could be wrong?

Can anyone confirm that unicode does work on a similar setup?

Embrey

What are the symbols you're expecting to see, and what do you get instead? It could be that the font you're using doesn't have glyphs for those symbols, so you could try different fonts. DejaVu Sans Mono has particularly good Unicode coverage. – Ledaledah

Nothing too out there. For instance the default "oh-my-zsh" prompt looks like this: ➜ ~. But in my mintty terminal the arrow doesn't work, instead I see an empty square. The same for ♭, 𝄪, 𝄫, ♯ which one of my apps use. I tried all of the different fonts available, including DejaVu Sans Mono and Courier New (which should also have good unicode support). It just doesn't make sense why it wouldn't work. – Embrey

On Windows 7, ➜, ♭ and ♯ all work for me with the default Lucida Console as well as Courier New and DejaVu Sans Mono. On XP, they only work with DejaVu Sans Mono. The other two didn't work on either machine, but then they didn't work in Firefox either. – Ledaledah

ps: Try catting this test file to check whether any non-ASCII stuff is working. – Ledaledah

Thank you ak2. DejaVu Sans Mono is indeed the only font that does work on XP. I thought I had tested it, but I must have made a mistake. Cheers – Embrey

ak2 - if you rework your comments into an answer, I'll give you a green tick ;) – Embrey

@Ledaledah change your comment to an answer. – Caseose

Answer 1

With that sort of issue, it's often worth trying a different font, because Unicode coverage varies quite a lot between fonts. The free DejaVu Sans Mono has better coverage than many others.

Ledaledah

Answer 2

My issue was with displaying λ. I had to set "Character set" to UTF-8 in the MinTTY options.

Rainey