Terminal doesn’t print special characters after changing to Italian keyboard layout

encodingkeyboardlanguageterminal

I'm on a second-hand macbook pro from 2013, running catalina 10.15.

It has built-in British keyboard layout but since I mostly write in Italian on an external Italian keyboard, I switched the layout to Italian from Sys preferences > Keyboard > Input sources > + > Italian.

In documents and browsers I get most of the accented vowels typical of the Italian language as well as the special characters such as pound (#), tilde (~) and the different kinds of brackets but in Terminal such characters are not represented correctly (UTF-8 encoding from Terminal's preferences, as I understand).

For example, pressing AltGr key and the à key doesn't yield # (as one would expect) in Terminal but ?. As you may understand the hash (aka pound) is essential in configuration files where it can comment out lines that are not needed. So how do I get the correct encoding/representation bw Terminal, external (lenovo) keyboard and macbook pro?

Any suggestion/workaround that I may try?


EDIT1

in Terminal '~' is apparently obtained with Alt + 5. See picture for result of this key combo:
arg5 instead of tilde
I get some "arg5" — what's that now?

Best Answer

Go to Terminal > Preferences > Keyboard and uncheck the box for Use Option as Meta Key.