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Wanting to give byobu a looksee as a screen 'update' of sorts. I start it with 

byobu

and instead of the status line sitting at the bottom of the screen, everytime it updates it pushes to an additional line underneath the previous one. before long, the screen (putty) is filled with status line echoes.

How do I stop this?

running puttytray v0.62 on win7 to ubuntu 12.04

monsto
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  • Can you paste the output of byobu -v? (Maintainer of byobu here) – Dustin Kirkland May 24 '12 at 18:08
  • @Dustin Kirkland ~$ byobu -v byobu version 5.17 tmux 1.6 – monsto May 24 '12 at 22:01
  • @DustinKirkland did not stop it. here's a screen of the output: http://i.imgur.com/uyFYi.png what you can't see there is that each line is added each second as the status time updates. that bottom line "34" is 34 seconds. turning off the clock on status only adds a line whenever the load or something else updates. – monsto Jun 04 '12 at 21:19
  • @DustinKirkland odd behaviour just now. . . i somehow lost a session with a couple screens on it. when i started byobu, it came up with the screen status lines as expected. I pressed ctrl-A and got the behaviour chooser, which was unexpected but whatever. I chose 'screen' behaviour and was dropped back to byobu, BUT with the tmux status lines. It was behaving properly (not scrolling) and it was using proper chars, not the illegible high-ascii chars. thought i would report this. might help t-shoot. – monsto Jun 14 '12 at 22:05
  • When you're seeing this behavior, can you please paste the output of these two commands, 'echo $LANG' and 'locale charmap'. Thanks! – Dustin Kirkland Jun 25 '12 at 14:58

7 Answers7

77

Putty defaults to a translation encoding of ISO-8859-1 where as Ubuntu sends out UTF-8 encoding.

Click on your server in the Load, save or delete a stored session window. Then click on the Load button.

Next, in the Category panel on the left click on: Window -> Translation

Change the drop down under "Received data assumed to be in which character set" to UTF-8.

Once you do that then click on Session in the top of the Category panel and then click on save in the stored sessions area.

I am not saying this is the correct fix. I am just telling you all what fixed it for me without having to do any crazy stuff to the server.

Cheers!

phanku
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    Small hint, you can also enable UTF-8 as the default encoding, as well as all other settings: Just open the window and don't load anything, make your changes(for example default encoding), then go back and hit save without entering anything in the session name field. From then on, that is your new default. – Kjellski Aug 18 '13 at 20:38
  • I have found that setting Window > Translation > UTF-8 solves A LOT of different putty display problems. – monsto May 27 '15 at 20:02
45

This seems to be an issue with the default byobu backend. By default, byobu in Ubuntu 12.04 uses tmux as the backend. You can change this by running byobu-select-backend and selecting screen (option 2).

While not a solution as to why tmux is doing this on PuTTY sessions, it fixes your issue for the screen scrolling.

Brian Turchyn
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9

The UTF-8 setting works wonders. I usually set this together with Terminal => Keyboard => "Function keys and kepad" from "ESC[n~" to "Xterm R6" and save it as default configuration in Putty. That last option enables the use of the F key functions in Byobu. It's pretty much useless without.

Peter
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I had a similar issue on a debian Testing/SID server, and it was an issue with several detached screen sessions loose on the system. ps aufx |grep -i screen should find orphaned screen sessions.

I tried sudo byobu-select-backend and tmux is the default on Debian Testing as well, I chose 'screen' but when I tried $ byobu the same scrolling behaviour ensued. So I ran $ byobu-select-backend as my regular user and selected 'screen' again.

This time, running byobu showed me the detached screen sessions, so I could select them and shut them down gently.

LittleBobbyTables - Au Revoir
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Wolf Halton
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@phanku's answer, namely that the terminal's encoding should be set to UTF-8, allowed me to fix the same problem that the OP described when accessing a byobu session (on Ubuntu 12.04) from a Mac OS X iterm with the help of Michael Hendrick's post that describes setting iTerm to UTF-8:

  1. menu: View -> Show Session Info
  2. Session tab: change Encoding from "Western (ASCII)" to "Unicode (UTF-8)".
orbeckst
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0

for me the problem was related to how compatibility was set:

in the terminal, go to:

  • right-click, choose 'profiles' > 'profile preference'
  • choose the 'compatibility' tab
  • change 'ambiguous-width characters' to 'Narrow'

or

  • just click on the 'reset' button

it worked for me ...

Nicolas
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I use iTerm2 in macOS and run into the same problem. The encoding is already set to UTF-8 but no help. Here's the solution that works for me:

  • Open Preferences > Profiles
  • Choose the profile with the problem
  • Go to Text tab on the right
  • Uncheck the Treat ambiguous-width characters as double width option

Done.

Jonathan Zhu
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