Unicode with Cygwin and MinTTY not working

Question

I don't understand why unicode is not working in my MinTTY terminal. I am using Windows XP

I have Cygwin v1.7.10 and MinTTY v1.0.3. Am also using the zsh shell (via "oh-my-zsh")

I have set local to "en_US" and the character set to "UTF-8" in the MinTTY settings dialog.

When I am at the MinTTY terminal, this is the output of the following environment variables:

echo $LC_ALL
*nothing*

echo $LC_CTYPE
en_US.UTF-8

echo $LANG
en_US.UTF-8

Yet when I am viewing files with unicode I can't see the symbols. As well, the default prompt for "oh-my-zsh" uses unicode, and that also is not working.

Does anyone know what could be wrong?

Can anyone confirm that unicode does work on a similar setup?

Answer 1

With that sort of issue, it's often worth trying a different font, because Unicode coverage varies quite a lot between fonts. The free DejaVu Sans Mono has better coverage than many others.

Answer 2

My issue was with displaying λ. I had to set "Character set" to UTF-8 in the MinTTY options.