Borders (and maybe other symbols) rendering oddly on Windows 10 Powershell

[tconbeer]

Reporting on behalf of a Harlequin user (@MoeJD), who reported this issue here.

Harlequin uses round borders almost everywhere. On this user's machine, those look like this:

I cannot reproduce this on my machine (Windows 11).

Here is what we've ruled out so far:

• It's not his terminal or their settings (we have the same Windows Terminal settings and he can repro in the VS Code terminal)
• It's not the font (he first reported this with ProFontWindows Nerd Font Mono, but he can repro using FiraCode, and ProFontWindows works fine on my machine)
• It's not his locale or default encoding (CP-1252, same as mine)

I'm at a dead-end, so I thought I'd ask for some help. I've asked him to try to run textual diagnose so we can include his output below.

[davep]

Just moving this to discussions as it seems more of a Q&A than an issue, and should be visible longer-term if other folk come looking for the same problem.

[tconbeer]

Totally fair. Thanks!

[davep]

I may have missed this somewhere: but have you confirmed that they have the same version of Windows Terminal as you (ideally the latest version).

I'm also mindful of the fact that the big difference here seems to be Windows 10 vs Windows 11.

[tconbeer]

No, that's a good catch. I'm on 1.17.11461.0. (@MoeJD FYI). There are also some options for repairing and resetting the installation that we should try. (This is all at Settings > Apps > Installed Apps > Terminal, at least on my machine).

[davep]

One other thing to consider, if it hasn't been so far: the individual profiles can override the general settings, so it may be worth checking the settings for the profile being used (a bit of a stretch, but work keeping in mind just in case).

[davep]

It's not his locale or default encoding (CP-1252, same as mine)

Now this is straying into areas of ignorance for me, but here I'm utf-8 if I run [System.Text.Encoding]::Default; and a quick search online suggests that Windows-1252 is constrained to just 256 characters (which would cut out the box drawing characters, amongst others).

So my likely candidate cause would be this; but you say you're running fine with the same setup. Which then makes me wonder if there's a difference in how Windows Terminal handles that sort of situation on Windows 11, vs 10.

But I'm not a Windows person so this is all pure guesswork and a quick Google.

[MoeJD]

My Terminal is also 1.17.11461.0

I am attempting to get textual diagnose to work but after pipx install textual but I am getting Error: No such command 'diagnose'

[TomJGooding]

I think that rules out the system/terminal being the issue then. So how did you run the textual demo?

[MoeJD]

python3 -m textual for this screenshot

[TomJGooding]

Sorry I'm getting a bit lost what's been installed with pipx vs simply pip. I think you might have textual installed globally via pip (not pipx), is that correct? If that's the case, then all this would suggest that pipx might be the problem. If nothng else, there is clearly something wrong with your installion if you can't actually invoke the programs you've installed.

[tconbeer]

Thanks for your help, Tom! I agree -- seems like the Python/pip/pipx installation is the problem. @MoeJD if I were you I would probably nuke everything and start over.

[MoeJD]

Textual Diagnostics

Versions

Name	Value
Textual	0.38.1
Rich	13.5.3

Python

Name	Value
Version	3.8.5
Implementation	CPython
Compiler	MSC v.1924 64 bit (AMD64)
Executable	c:\program files\python38\python.exe

Operating System

Name	Value
System	Windows
Release	10
Version	10.0.19041

Terminal

Name	Value
Terminal Application	Windows Terminal
TERM	Not set
COLORTERM	Not set
FORCE_COLOR	Not set
NO_COLOR	Not set

Rich Console options

Name	Value
size	width=252, height=67
legacy_windows	False
min_width	1
max_width	252
is_terminal	True
encoding	utf-8
max_height	67
justify	None
overflow	None
no_wrap	False
highlight	None
markup	None
height	None