#+TITLE: OpenBSD Weechat Question Mark Message Separator Fix
#+DATE: 2024-02-23T19:46:49-05:00
#+DRAFT: false
#+DESCRIPTION: Fix the weechat message separator character being replaced by a question mark on OpenBSD
#+TAGS[]: weechat openbsd
#+KEYWORDS[]: weechat openbsd
#+SLUG:
#+SUMMARY:

#+ATTR_HTML: :title OpenBSD weechat separator fix
#+ATTR_HTML: :alt OpenBSD weechat separator changing from a question mark to a pipe character
[[file:cover.png]]


I just solved what was becoming a very aggravating issue thanks to the
help from the folks in the =#weechat= channel in Libera.Chat.

On OpenBSD, my =weechat= client would put a question mark to separate
the nicks and the messages sent with a question mark instead of a
pipe-looking character like it should.

It looks like this was caused by opening =weechat= without having the
correct locale set. By default, OpenBSD uses a locale of =C=, which
only supports =ASCII= characters. According to the [[https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq10.html#locales][FAQ]] however, you
should be able to set your locale to =en_US.UTF-8= to get unicode
support when available.

The confusing thing was that after correctly setting the locale to
UTF-8 by adding the following line to my =~/.profile=, it was still broken.

#+begin_src sh
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
#+end_src

It looks like the reason was that =weechat= had saved
=weechat.look.prefix_suffix= as =?= after opening in a locale that
doesn't support the character it wanted to use. The fix was to run
=/unset weechat.look.prefix_suffix= after setting the correct locale.

I also plan on keeping =weechat= open in a =tmux= buffer, so I need to
set the =$TERM= environment variable to allow 256 colours.

To do that, I need to set the =$TERM= environment variable to
=tmux-256color= instead of the default =screen= so that =weechat= can
use a richer selection of colors when displaying information.

To do that, edited =~/.tmux.conf= and added the following line.

#+begin_src conf
set -g default-terminal "tmux-256color"
#+end_src

Now everything looks as it should and we're ready to idle!