I won’t go into the story of why I wanted this except to say that computers existed before the proliferation of the Internet, and sometimes it’s fun to go back in time. In this case, I’ve been using a large number of terminal (telnet) client packages: PuTTY, the generic telnet built into Windows, the telnet clients that come with GNOME and KDE, and so forth.
One issue I discovered is that none of them are set up to display ASCII line drawing characters, so any ANSI art comes out as a complete cluster**** of umlauts and twirliecues.
The magic answer: Code Page 437
Yes, that’s the answer. The problem is, most clients don’t support it anymore because it’s not even close to Unicode compliant.
So, the workaround? Set your terminal’s code page translation to one of the following:
860 (Portugese)
861 (Icelandic)
862 (Hebrew)
865 (Nordic)
I’ve been using CP 862 in all my Linux clients without issue.
In PuTTY, however, you can go to the code translation section of the window menu and type “CP437” into the code page translation box, and you get exactly what you need.
This seems to be a common problem for us old-timers, and the answers aren’t really easy to find. (I spent well over an hour on this stupid thing just so I could getting a spinning ASCII prompt.) Hopefully this saves someone else a headache or two.
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