Xfce4-terminal: hieroglyphic fonts
 

I seem to have found another glitch with xfce4-terminal and mc.

* Launch xfce4-terminal.
* Open mc.
* Select a text file.
* Press F4 to launch mcedit.
* Exit mcedit.

The fonts in the tab and window title bar change to some kind of hieroglyphics fonts. Perhaps some kind of line font, I don't know.

I fiddled some with LC environment variables. Same hieroglyphic results.

I configured mc to use an external editor and changed EDITOR=nano and VISUAL=nano. Same hieroglyphic results.

I am unable to replicate the hieroglyphics in mate-terminal or [u]xterm. The glitch seems isolated to xfce4-terminal.

Any ideas?

Edit: I installed roxterm and see the same hieroglyphic results. Curious. Possibly points to the underlying vte engine?

You asked for ideas; here's mine. Stop fighting all these second-rate terminals and just use xterm, a battle-tested terminal designed to work with X. Spend some time getting ~/.Xresources to your satisfaction. Knowing you I have no doubt you already have .Xresources working to your satisfaction. Then get tmux or screen working if you want multiple tabs in your terminal. I'm probably one of the few who went from tmux to screen and found screen better behaved and just as easy to configure.

Result? I've had no issues since I moved to xterm and abandoned all the other terminal emulators I had been trying over the years: rxvt-unicode, konsole, xfce-terminal. The only other terminal I'm happy with is mlterm, but that's because I own a Japanese van and I know what that country is like in its pursuit of perfection.

xfce4-terminal (I assume you mean the one in -current?) just isn't very good.

Use Kitty.

It has 24-bit color support, displays every character in quickbrown.txt, can display color emoji, and has a featureset that's intended to make tmux redundant. It's also famously performant.

You have a point. I am somewhat surprised after all these decades that there seems to be no simple base foundation for X terminal emulators that all developers might use. I thought vte was supposed to be such a foundation, but perhaps I misunderstand. After all these decades the simple things like this should not break. :)

Big missing feature for me with xterm is tabs. :( I already use screen but I don't think that will help me with respect to replacing multiple tabs. Often I have a terminal window open with several tabs. I'm not into tiling windows either so multiple terminal windows won't help. :)

Now that file is an interesting test. On my system xfce4-terminal fails dramatically. To be certain I used a test account and defaults. Changing xfce4-terminal to UTF-8 renders quickbrown.txt correctly but makes no difference with respect to the original hieroglyphic results.

This is my favourite terminal, you can pry RXVT (well, now urxvt) from my stiff, dead fingers. I've been using this for near 20 years.

I think it needs the scalable fonts for "-fn 9x15" but that's the look I'm used to. Nothing else will do :-)

I don't use it, but mc looks pretty good in my terminal.

tmux (like screen) keeps a session alive when you aren't connected. I didn't see where kitty did that.

Current or 14.2? I am unable to reproduce your problem in 14.2.

14.2. That you can't reproduce in 14.2 might mean something in my global settings causing the glitch.

Perhaps I found a solution: xfce4-terminal 0.6.92.

I am unable to replicate the original hieroglyphics fonts.

I am unable to make the window shrink with a persistent tab bar (MiscAlwaysShowTabs=TRUE).

With 0.6.92 I am unable to replicate the weird line wrap I described in my first test of 0.6.92.

Interestingly, 0.6.92 supports more colors with the following one-liner I found online, whereas 0.6.3 does not:

printf "\x1b[38;2;255;100;0mTRUECOLOR\x1b[0m\n"1b[0m\n"

I don't notice anything directly related in the change long but the color fix might be related to changing to vte3.

I'm holding my breath with the weird line wrapping.

If you're using tmux, then the best terminal to run it in is currently Termite. Believe me, I've been looking into this over the last few days.

Use my SlackBuild. It's much better than the one on SBo.

https://github.com/duganchen/my_slac...master/termite

Same support for millions of colors, UTF-8, and colored emoji as Kitty.

You can have multiple windows in screen, something I consider to be better than tabs. Create a new window with prefix key + c, and switch between them with prefix key + n (next) and prefix key + p (previous).

I use ` (backtick) for prefix key, so it's fairly convenient. To send a real backtick while you're in screen, press the key twice.

To rename a window, just do prefix key + A

See attached for multiple screen windows (vim, mutt, mc, etc.,), within one fluxbox window.

I created a fresh stock 14.2 VM with Xfce as the default desktop. Same hieroglyphics with xfce-terminal 0.6.3 and mc.

Learn something new every day. I gave that a whirl but I haven't wrapped my head around the idea. I understand what is happening but I think I prefer physical tabs. I'll have to tinker more.

What are called windows in screen is really tabs. One fluxbox xterm window can have multiple screen windows, accessed by shortcut.

You can also have multiple panes, which is more or less the tiling you were thinking of. The attached image shows one fluxbox window, xterm, with multiple screen windows running inside, and the visible screen window split into three panes - a top pane and a bottom pane, with the bottom pane split horizontally. It's hard to wrap your head around it because windows in a window manager are not the same as windows in screen, so I just visualise windows in screen as tabs.

You can see a list of windows in screen, and select another window, with prefix key + "

I should tag this thread as solved. Since installing xfce4-terminal 0.6.92 I haven't had related issues.