PuTTY Line Characters not displaying properly in ZSH?

Question

Can anyone give me some direction on what is wrong with Putty that is causing this? Note that PuTTY is set to an encoding of UTF-8, and the line characters are set to be handled with Unicode. Also, i've tried every combination i can think of.. spent hours on this and still no end in sight.. any help would be much appreciated.

Here is what putty looks like..

lq(lee@work:pts/5)qqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq(~)qk
mq(%) echo $TERM                                                                                                                             qj
xterm
lq(lee@work:pts/5)qqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq(~)qk
mq(%) echo $LANG                                                                                                                             qj
en_US.UTF-8
lq(lee@work:pts/5)qqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq(~)qk
mq(%)                                                                                                                                        qj

And what really confuses me.. is here is what screen looks like.. (Note that screen was launched in the same zsh session shown above.)

┌─(lee@work:pts/4)────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────(~)─┐
└─(%) echo $TERM                                                                                                                             ─┘
screen
┌─(lee@work:pts/4)────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────(~)─┐
└─(%) echo $LANG                                                                                                                             ─┘
en_US.UTF-8
┌─(lee@work:pts/4)────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────(~)─┐
└─(%)                                                                                                                                        ─┘

Screen is obviously showing what i desire.. yet i cannot figure out why ZSH is not rendering properly.. Anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

PuTTY doesn't support the VT100 line drawing characters in UTF-8 mode. See PuTTY wish utf8-plus-vt100. Other terminal emulators such as xterm or mintty do support this, however.

Screen is itself a terminal emulator that just happens to be running in another terminal, and I expect it maps the VT100 line drawing characters to the relevant Unicode codepoints. That also points to the solution for PuTTY: use the Unicode box drawing characters.