Tmux Powerline Special Characters Issue
Tmux is a terminal multiplexer like Screen on steroids. It is faster, slicker and much more easily extendable than screen. For why you might want to try tmux over screen checkout these articles :
Tmux Powerline is an extension to tmux’s statusline which makes it look incredibly cool. Look at this screenshot:
There are 2 projects that provide this feature.
The second one by Lokaltog, originally was a plugin for vim that inspired tmux-powerline, today it is the right choice and has bindings for most shells, vim and even tmux, so it can be used as a single solution for all. The installation instructions are simple.
However when I initially installed it, I was facing a weird issue, something that I didn’t find much information on. No one seemed to have faced a similar issue or reported any relavant fixes. See the screenshot below to get an idea about the issue. Notice how the status line is crooked?
After a lot of digging around I was able to deduce that the issue was because
tmux wasn’t supporting UTF-8 characters. After a lot of attempts I found
a temporary fix by simply using tmux -u which forces tmux to use UTF-8
instead of trying to figure out UTF-8 support from the system locale. And it
magically fixed the issue!
From that then I went and manually edited the /etc/defaults/locale and
switched my LANG=en_IN to LANG=en_IN.UTF-8. You can use the command
locale -a to figure out what locale is supported by your system and use one
that you think is appropriate, but ensure you use the UTF-8 one. After this
change I had to restart my system and the problem was fixed permanently. Hope
it helps others who may be facing similar issues.