Bug 1417166

I have this issue too, and looking into this (unless I have misunderstood something), rxvt-unicode is compiled without any unicode support at all

urxvt --help 2>&1 | grep options
options: perl,xft,styles,combining,blink,encodings=eu+vn+jp+jp-ext+kr+zh+zh-ext,fade,transparent,tint,pixbuf,XIM,frills,selectionscrolling,wheel,slipwheel,smart-resize,cursorBlink,pointerBlank,scrollbars=plain+rxvt+NeXT+xterm

This is quite a key feature as a lot of users often run powerline and need unicode support.

Hi guys,

As we can see in the specs (https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/rxvt-unicode-256color/sources/spec/), the package rxvt-unicode-256color is not compile with unicode3, but the multilingual version is (rxvt-unicode-ml). I don't know if it is on purpose, anyway a simple workaround is to install and use rxvt-unicode-ml.

Regards,

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This is still valid on Fedora 28

rxvt-unicode3 is still not not compiled with unicode3 option, which causes powerline symbols and other unicode characters display uncorrectly. 

# urxvt --help                                    
rxvt-unicode (urxvt) v9.22 - released: 2016-01-23
options: perl,xft,styles,combining,blink,encodings=eu+vn+jp+jp-ext+kr+zh+zh-ext,fade,transparent,tint,pixbuf,XIM,frills,selectionscrolling,wheel,slipwheel,smart-resize,cursorBlink,pointerBlank,scrollbars=plain+rxvt+NeXT+xterm
Usage: urxvt [options] [-e command args]
...

I believe two things are being, regrettably, conflated here:

1. some compiled variants of urxvt are not compiled with "unicode3"
   option

2. Powerline doesn't work out of the box, even when powerline-fonts
   package installed and urxvt properly configured to use it
   (e.g. via "-fn xft:...,xft:powerline") and that's because
   powerline-fonts carries rather a fouled font in a way it doesn't
   contain any "standard" character urxvt could use to get the font
   metrics (width) right:

   https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/CDBIOLOE6W7W7RHVBWFXZ5DJ3AOOZT7G/


Solutions:

re 1.: use the variants that are "unicode3" per [comment 2], end of story

re 2., diehard variant:
       work with powerline-fonts upstream and persuade them to make the
       font sane so that the width can be detected correctly in urxvt
       (or converesely, with urxvt upstream that it needs more
        sophisticated way to detect such width if at all possible)

re 2., easy variant (this is what I am sticking with for the time being):
       install and use the explicitly patched variant of your favourite
       (monospace) font: https://github.com/powerline/fonts

All in all, please stop conflating two separate issues.  Merely based
on the bug summary of this bug, the problem was with 1. which is
a solved problem so that's rightfully closed now.  You can open a new
one regarding point 2., but that could/should as well be targeting
powerline-fonts, i.e. powerline component.