# Finch is not visible right



## sk8harddiefast (Jul 23, 2010)

I installed Finch as alternatibe to amsn.
The problem is that finch is not visible right on my terminal.
I take a lot of synbols like @ and is really bad looking make it too difficult to use it.
I tried to change fonts from .Xdefaults even tried other terminal but the problem remains.
Any idea?


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## dbi (Jul 23, 2010)

+1

I had the same problem and this was the reason to drop Finch.
I'm not very happy with Pidgin either, but I haven't found a better alternative yet. I find it especially annoying that Pidgin collapses/hides the buddy list(s) when off-line.


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## sk8harddiefast (Jul 23, 2010)

Alternative of pidgin is amsn which is very good!
But is like pidgin. With Gui. And i want to remove amsn and use only finch


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## dbi (Jul 23, 2010)

I'm in search for a console IM client too.

My hope is in CenterIM [1].
Unfortunately I need real UTF-8 support but it is planned for the next major version. However, the next major version has no clear schedule yet.

There are some encoding conversion tricks that could work for you [2].

[1] http://www.centerim.org
[2] Set the  correct encoding in a utf-8 enabled terminal and pipe through x11/luit


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## sk8harddiefast (Jul 24, 2010)

I tried centerim too.
Same result.
He displaying me a lot of symbols like @


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## dbi (Jul 24, 2010)

CenterIM worked OK here if I didn't use UTF-8 locale.
Assuming you need to type in Greek Alphabet, I'd suggest doing something like:

[cmd=]export LC_ALL=gr_GR.CP1253
centerim[/cmd]
in sh/bash/zsh.

That way you'd be able send and receive messages with other people using CP1253 but you'd see crazy symbols if someone sends you UTF-8 encoded messages.


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## sk8harddiefast (Jul 24, 2010)

What is exactly utf-8?
Well i think that fonts is my problem.
I use snap fonts.


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## dbi (Jul 24, 2010)

sk8harddiefast said:
			
		

> What is exactly utf-8?
> Well i think that fonts is my problem.
> I use snap fonts.




Unicode Transformation Format.

It's the way symbols are encoded and decoded when sent between devices. 

For easier understanding search the Internet for
ASCII - American Standard Code for Information Interchange.

In short in ASCII each symbol was represented by 7 bits.
This gives you 7 zeros or ones which is 2^7 = 128 combinations ergo using that table you can represent 128 symbols - the latin letters [a-z, A-Z], the Arabic numbers [0-9] and some common symbols.

Then it was modified so that each symbol is represented by 1 byte (8 bits) ergo 2^8 = 256 symbols hence the name Extended ASCII Table.
Unfortunately 256 are enough only to represent about two western alphabets at the same time - Arabic numbers and Latin + Greek or Latin + Cyrillic letters.

Unfortunately Latin and Cyrillic have many sub-variants. So, for every sub-version there was an encoding table covering all its symbols.

Not to mention the Eastern languages which I believe use much more symbols.

The end result of this was a total mess IMHO.

Enter Unicode. Encoding that covers all the symbols at once. Unfortunately we are living in the age when the software is being converted to use UTF instead of ACSII based tables.


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## sk8harddiefast (Jul 28, 2010)

Well i tried finch & centerim on console mode with same results! :OOO


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