Subject: bug#37363: emacs and other programs do not display special characters

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2019 18:27:29 -0500

Hello Guix:

I am reporting this because there are no other similar cases on the
mailing list and because I think this might be a bug and not my error.

Emacs Magit and Emacs shell don't dispaly special characters (such as ñ,
í, ó) on their output. It is strange because a command that includes a
special character is displayed. But a special character from the output
will not be displayed correcly. Those special characters are displayed
correctly on afairs such as opening a file with those characters.

With 'emacs -Q' I did not have that problem. When copying .emacs.d to
another directory, setting that directory as HOME and running emacs with
'mkdir ~/temp', 'cp ~/.emacs.d ~/temp/' and 'HOME="~/temp" emacs', it
would not use my configurations. But it would not have the problem with
Emacs shell. Emacs Magit would not be available either. The same situation
is with 'emacs -Q' as with 'HOME="~/temp" emacs'.

Sample from BASh displaye correctly:

quiliro@GSD3 ~/magit/prueba0$ git log
commit 0904ec46cb737d2116d59b0b7c4f0c21a74feb70 (HEAD -> master)
Author: quiliro <[email-masked]>
Date:   Sun Sep 8 15:43:09 2019 -0500

    Modificación remota

commit 5024f6d525b1b61cd2691aaaa60dde07ae6f489f (origin/master)
Author: ramiro.ordonez <[email-masked]>
Date:   Sun Sep 8 13:20:11 2019 -0500

    Añadí a mi amor
quiliro@GSD3 ~/magit/prueba0$

Same command sample from Emacs shell displayed incorrectly:

quiliro@GSD3 ~/magit/prueba0$ git log
WARNING: terminal is not fully functional
-  (press RETURN)
commit 0904ec46cb737d2116d59b0b7c4f0c21a74feb70 (HEAD -> master)
Author: quiliro <[email-masked]>
Date:   Sun Sep 8 15:43:09 2019 -0500

    ModificaciÃ³n remota

commit 5024f6d525b1b61cd2691aaaa60dde07ae6f489f (origin/master)
Author: ramiro.ordonez <[email-masked]>
Date:   Sun Sep 8 13:20:11 2019 -0500

    AÃ±adÃ­ a mi amor
quiliro@GSD3 ~/magit/prueba0$

I am not sure if this is related that in Icecat I sometimes see square
boxes with numbers inside them in place of characters. But other special
characters are displayed. That is probably a missing font. It could be a
separate problem.

Happy hacking!