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Add warning on startup if locale/language suggests missing "icons" #256
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From my past experience with urwid, I would say it's a bad idea to implement complex icons even if we detect UTF-16 support or better, since some characters are differently interpreted by different terminals on the same OS and they end up distorting display for ZT and you can't predict which icon may give you problems. |
@amanagr I was focusing this issue initially just on the UTF-8 issue with lines and bullets, though I do agree generally that this could get overly complex very easily. That said, an alternative approach may be to generalize themes beyond colors to include icons (or have 'icon themes'), and keep the default theme as simple (and working!) as possible, while allowing other icons on more potentially-compatible displays? |
Even for a most capable system these factors are important in rendering a successful "icon theme":
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This commit shows the warning message during loading, if UTF-8 encoding isn't found enabled in the locale. NOTE: The warning might be shown even if icons are rendering properly. This might be due to default UTF support for some terminals. However, this could be a potential risk with other OS (e.g., WSL) and hence robust for such scenarios. Test added. Fixes zulip#256.
There haven't been significant known issues related to UTF-8 in this way for some time that I'm aware of. As discussed in #zulip-terminal>ZT crashing when scrolling down the user list it therefore feels appropriate to close this issue now and remove the advice given in the FAQ. The latter will take place shortly in #979 (testing symbol rendering using shipped script + FAQ entry changes). Given this decision I'm closing this issue, and as per the discussion mentioned above, this removes the need for #994, an intended fix. The approach of icon themes has been isolated into #938 recently, which will likely be the longer-term solution to make the most of systems with minimal/typical/advanced icon/font/symbol support, and which is the expected solution to the problem described in #178. |
At least one user reported that the screen had question marks or similar, and it turned out their locale did not include UTF-8.
We do note that eg.
en_US.UTF-8
is suggested in the FAQs, though I personally useen_GB.UTF-8
and the drawing lines and so on all work fine. However, if I runLANG=en_GB zulip-term
then the top lines are instead????
, and the bullets for the top-left buttons and users are also?
.Given that we can detect the
LANG
setting by accessing the environment variables, we should be able to give a warning on startup that the icons/lines may be incorrect/unexpected.Beyond this, in future we could aim to be adaptable:
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