junk in remote mutt

Bill Campbell freebsd at celestial.com
Tue Mar 25 06:32:25 UTC 2008


On Tue, Mar 25, 2008, Chad Perrin wrote:
>On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 07:23:43AM +0300, Yuri Pankov wrote:
>> On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 04:03:54PM -0600, Chad Perrin wrote:
>> > I'm not sure that's a very good title for this email, but it's what I've
>> > got.
>> > 
>> > Since configuring my environment to use UTF-8, I've had a problem while
>> > checking email on a server.  I log into the server via SSH, then enter
>> > the `mutt` command.  As I page through the inbox, open and close emails,
>> > et cetera, I get a bunch of junk on the screen -- characters from the
>> > previous screen appearing on the current screen.  I have to use Ctrl + L
>> > to clear it up and return the appearance of the screen to the way it's
>> > supposed to look.
>> > 
>> > What can I do to eliminate this problem?  I don't want to have to force a
>> > screen redraw every time I switch between views, scroll down a page in
>> > mutt, and so on.  I also don't want to go back to a character set limited
>> > to plain ol' ASCII (there's a reason I use rxvt-unicode instead of rxvt).
>> 
>> Don't see it here. If you are sure that mutt uses UTF-8 charset (ie,
>> forced it with 'set charset="utf-8"'), make sure it's linked against
>> ncursesw library (and not just ncurses) - need to use WITH_NCURSES_PORT
>> on 6.2 and earlier or build it using WITH_SLANG.
>
>I finally got around to checking the settings in the Makefile and
>recompiling mutt.  End result: same problem.  If anyone else has any
>ideas what might be causing this problem, please let me know.
>
>addendum: The computer I'm using as a client to access mutt on another
>machine doesn't have this same problem locally.  When I open a local mutt
>instance, there's no junk on the screen.  I decided to try using SSH
>through the remote system where I'm encountering this issue, then from
>there using SSH to get back to the local machine, and opened mutt inside
>this contrived SSH loop.  Still no problem.  Thus, whatever the problem
>is seems to be particular to the remote machine.
>

What is your TERM environment variable setting?  Are the terminfo
files on the remote system current?

I'm reasonably sure that mutt uses ncurses, and if it is not
built correctly, that could also cause problems.

Bill
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