Ubuntu – unicode characters do not appear in gnome terminal for vim airline

14.10gnome-terminalunicodeutf-8vim

I know this has been asked a few times but none of the answers worked for me.

I use the gnome terminal as default in Ubuntu 14.10 and I can't get unicode characters to show properly, mainly in vim airline.

I have set character encoding to unicode UTF8 in the terminal menu.

and LANG returns utf8:

echo $LANG
en_US.UTF-8

I have installed a patched font from https://github.com/powerline/fonts/

I have probably also tried other tips found on stackexchange that I now can't remember and I still see the weird characters:

weird characters

When I installed the same font on OSX with iterm it worked instantly.

I have also tried in other terminals on the same system like guake or using ctrl-alt-f1 and the result is the same. I have tried inside or outside tmux as well.

Any help is welcome.

Best Answer

I've uploaded a Unicode test file which you should download and then cat in your terminal.

E.g.: cat ~/Downloads/Unicode-sample.txt and then use Shift+PgUp and Shift+PgDn in the terminal to verify whether all characters display correctly.

If you get the same results in your terminal as opening the original source file in your browser, your font is fine; otherwise, it's a dodgy font: use a different one. (I use "Envy Code R")

And once the terminal is fine, all applications running in the terminal will be fine as well!

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