Tag Archives: byobu

byobu: properly displaying unicode characters under GNU Screen

With the need to have multiple sessions via terminal multiplexer, I’ve recently switched back to using GNU Screen rather than tmux. In this transition, I’ve noticed the following:

$ printf '%b\n' '\ue0b0\ue0b1\ue0b2\ue0b3\ue0b4'
Screenshot

Unicode characters don’t appear correctly. So I had to add the following to ~/.bashrc and restart my bash session to get it to display the unicode characters and symbols properly again.

export LC_ALL=en_US.utf-8

Now, it shows up fine.

Screenshot

This may be helpful to those who make use of special Unicode symbols, which are often non-standard, via NerdTree, Airline or Powerline VIM or Neovim plugins. This may be applicable to Nerd Font users as well.

Note: I’m using Naver’s D2 Coding Font.