UTF-8 locales and display corruption

[Jeramey Crawford]

On Thu, Feb 16, 2006 at 08:55:04AM -0500, Robert Huff wrote:
> >  If I should set my LANG environment variable to "en_US.UTF-8",
> >  many terminal applications which link to and use ncurses begin to
> >  have various degrees of display corruption. Does anyone know how
> >  to fix this, or what the cause is?
> 
> 	Not familiar with the details, but have you recompiled the
> offenders?

Yes, several times. I've tried compiling mutt-devel from the port using
each of the WITH_MUTT_SLANG and WITH_MUTT_NCURSES options, and both
suffer from similar display problems.

Typically the display problem in all apps is that any line which
contains a multibyte character will have any colors or highlighting
misapplied, with either the painted area being too short or too long. In
the first case, this will typically lead to parts of the display not
being redrawn properly if the app scrolls the text it is displaying
since the app will generally try to be lazy and repaint only the parts
of the display that need it. In the second case, the highlighted area
will often spill into the next line, corrupting it and making it
unreadable.

It looks kind of like FreeBSD's libncurses doesn't support multibyte
characters properly.