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List:       mutt-users
Subject:    [solved] garbage thread characters with utf8
From:       Hein Zelle <hein () icce ! rug ! nl>
Date:       2011-06-21 4:41:11
Message-ID: 20110621044111.GA12019 () draconix ! gallia ! gl
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Dear mutt users / developers,

I have found a (the?) solution to the problem mentioned in the FAQ where 
utf8 characters used to draw the message thread (red arrows) become 
garbled.  In my case (seen it multiple times) it happened on a new 
ubuntu 10.04 system.

The problem has to do with the LANG setting: this should be set to 
en_US.utf8 or something similar.  Setting that in a terminal and running 
mutt did NOT fix the problem though.  The issue: the LANG variable 
was NOT set when the terminal (gnome-terminal) was started, so the 
terminal program itself (gnome-terminal) was not using the utf8 locale.

Solution: set your LANG variable in your first login script (e.g. 
.xsession), or change the system wide default to a utf8 encoding.  
In my case I did this with

sudo update-locale LANG=en_US.utf8

Logout after doing this, so your environment picks it up.  Note that 
setting LANG in .bashrc is probably not going to work, as this is not 
read by your login environment (e.g. gdm + xsession).  

Perhaps it's an idea to put this on the mutt wiki page.
I hope it helps someone  else.

Kind regards,

Hein Zelle
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