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up vote 1 down vote favorite

In my Debian Linux terminal some fonts looks like this. But any text editor (i.e leafpad) shows this font correctly. What is the problem?

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ouch, please show echo $LANG echo $0 echo -e "\xE2\x98\xA0". If you launch uxterm, does the same problem appear? Also, while it is exemplary to have strong sudo passwords (in your case 24 characters), it is not advisable to save it in clear text in your home directory. –  Sebastian yesterday
    
I should say that this happens with some fonts that i manually installed! –  HBS yesterday

2 Answers 2

up vote 2 down vote accepted

It looks like you're using a variable width font in your terminal in the first picture. This is why characters are smashed. Terminal prompts should be used only with fixed width fonts (e.g. Monospace, FreeMono, Courier).

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Is there a way to fix this? I really want this font!!! –  HBS yesterday
1  
You could try to find a font which looks similar but it's monospaced. –  dr01 yesterday
    
This will suggest you similar fonts: identifont.com/similar.html –  dr01 yesterday
up vote 0 down vote

With the information you provided, I have two guesses:

  1. Font configuration is somehow incorrect.
  2. Customized prompt with some special character messing with the character encoding.

For the first guess, since you are using a graphical interface, check that the font configuration is correct under System->Preferences->Appearance->Fonts tab and play around the font settings and formats.

For the second guess, check the contents of your environmental variables PS1, PS2, PS3 and PS4 running echo $PS1, echo $PS2, etc. in the terminal and check that the contents do not contain special characters that could mess the encoding. Make some tests changing the prompt to very simplistic ones (but backup the contents of the variables first!) In case you are not familiar with prompt customization or with the meaning of all the characters that will come with the contents of the PS* variables, consult this nice tutorial, it is short and very illustrative.

Good luck!

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