Introduction

This is a series of musings on Cygwin customizations.

xterm, UTF-8, & U+2010 "hyphen"

With the release of Cygwin-1.7, many must have come across man pages with strange or missing characters. For example, while xterm supports UTF-8, hyphens appear as boxes with Lucida Console. And with rxvt, â^’ is sprinkled liberally in man pages.

Since the problem with Lucida Console and many other Windows fonts is caused by the missing glyph at U+2010, you can overcome it by using the Consolas font, a fixed pitch font for tty usage. For example, your .Xdefaults may contain the following for nice xterm output:

xterm*vt100*background: black
xterm*vt100*foreground: green
xterm*vt100*faceName:   Consolas
xterm*vt100*faceSize:   18

Last updated on 5 Feb 2010