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Fix Umlauts in the XFCE Terminal

Posted by Daniel Lange on
IT

The XFCE Terminal has the weird issue of sometimes showing question marks (?) instead of German Umlauts (äöüÄÖÜ) although they work fine in any other stock XFCE application (e.g. the default editor "mousepad").

The solution to this can be found on the XFCE Forums but it took me quite some time to find it. It was difficult to find a suitable search query to dig out that page. Google turns up a lot of irrelevant stuff on "XFCE Terminal question marks"...

XFCE Editor Umlauts with and without LANG variable set

The problem with Umlauts (and other 8bit ASCII characters) showing as question marks arises if the user has no LANG variable set.

A simple

export LANG=en_US

resolves the issue. Put that into ~/.bashrc or any other place suitable in your distribution.

Gentoo users may want to

su  # become root
echo "LANG=en_US" >> /etc/env.d/02locale
env-update
exit
source /etc/profile

to set the LANG variable system-wide.

So keywords, dear Google: Umlaute, deutsch, Fragezeichen, kaputt, falsch, broken, display, zeigt, charset, Zeichensatz :-)