[Kitty] Ranger does not display devicons

[tbrodbeck]

Runtime Environment

• Operating system and version: macOS 14.01
• Terminal emulator and version: kitty 0.19.2
• Ranger version/commit: ranger version: ranger 1.9.3
• Python version: 2.7.16 (default, Oct 30 2020, 02:15:49) [GCC Apple LLVM 12.0.0 (clang-1200.0.30.4) [+internal-os, ptrauth-isa=sign+stri
• Locale: None.None
• shell: zsh 5.8 (x86_64-apple-darwin20.0)

Current Behavior

When using kitty the devicons (https://github.com/alexanderjeurissen/ranger_devicons) the icons are sometimes shown and sometimes not. Instead there are those characters:

Expected Behavior

Display devicons to the left of files and directories.

Context

If I start kitty from another terminal (not kitty), the devicons are shown as expected.
BTW, I have already discussed with the creator of kitty about that issue: kovidgoyal/kitty#3124

Steps to reproduce

1. Install alexanderjeurissen/ranger_devicons
2. Open kitty
3. type ranger

[toonn]

Hmm, I have no idea what the issue might be, tbh. @kovidgoyal, maybe you recognize this issue?

[kovidgoyal]

From the screenshot, it seems clear ranger is producing things like ~W instead of unicode codepoints correspondining to the icons. Why is it doing so, I have no idea.

[toonn]

@kovidgoyal, there's no difference in what the plugin does. So this change must be coming from the environment. Maybe kitty defaults to a different locale than other terminals or something?

[kovidgoyal]

That's what I originally suggested to the OP, but he insists he has set
all environment variables correctly.

[toonn]

My apologies, I missed the existing issue linked in the OP.
All the plugin does is prefix displayed filenames with a unicode character string. The only reason i can think of for that to get displayed as ASCII is an encoding problem either when reading those strings form the devicon.py file or when writing them to the terminal. Since encoding depends on locale this points to a locale issue.

@tbrodbeck, what are the values of LANG and all the LC_* variables and do they not differ at all between the environments? Are you running ranger with the same python executable?

[tbrodbeck]

Hey when I use export LC_CTYPE=UTF-8 before starting ranger it actually works. Great. Then this is the variable that makes the difference.

@kovidgoyal As I described in the issue I already used env LC_CTYPE=UTF-8 in the kitty.conf but this actually does not seem to work. Can you maybe clarify how to setup the environment for kitty?

[kovidgoyal]

It works fine. Probably your shell is overriding it, look in your shell
rc files.

[tbrodbeck]

I am not sure about that. I tried launching kitty with several shells (including the default one) and env | grep LC_CTYPE does not give any output. Thus I assume it is not overridden rather not set.

[kovidgoyal]

kitty --config NONE -o 'env=WORKS=yay' bash -c "env | grep WORKS; read"

will show you
WORKS=yay

The extra = after env is needed for use with -o, you dont need it in
kitty.conf

[kovidgoyal]

Oh yeah and now that I recall the value of LC_CTYPE=UTF-8 is ignored because of a bug in python, see kovidgoyal/kitty#1233 so if rander needs it for some reason, then set it explicitly in your shell rc scripts.

[tbrodbeck]

Ah now things are clearer. :D
I added this to my shell file, now it is working. Thank you so much!

[toonn]

@kovidgoyal, am I understanding that issue right, this is a problem because kitty removes that env var from the environment as a workaround?

[kovidgoyal]

No, it only removes it if python adds it. It also removed it when the
user added it, which was why env didnt work, but that is already fixed.