LendKey

Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Fix display problem when running Far Manager in Chinese environment

Far Manager is the greatest file manager I have been using over the longest time and cannot live without.

Besides of all the great features and plugins, I do keep running into an annoying issue on my Windows with region set to Chinese. The problem is in Chinese environment, FAR window will be screwed with panel borders shown as garbage characters like below :


I have tried many ways to resolve the issue.
On Win95 through XP, I was able to create a batch file just to start Far, create a shortcut to the batch and set Code Page to English. Although I will not be able to see any Chinese file names, the display looks good.

But in Vista, somehow the code page dropdown turned to be empty. So I had to search for other solutions. Luckily, I do find something very handy which I will share below. Basically you can create a shortcut, and enter the following command into it:

C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /c chcp 437&&"C:\Program Files (x86)\Far\far.exe"


The idea is simple, it set current code page to 437 by "chcp 437". 437 is English in Windows.
Then start Far.

Please be advised, I'm running Vista 64bit. If you run in 32bit OS, the path is different. But it does not matter.

I also often change layout of shortcut to: 100 x 50:


Click on the shortcut, you will see a nice Far window:



I think the trick also works on other locales in case you run into the same issue.

Just heard Far goes open source! What a great news! Wow!!!

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Wow!!! Thanks a lot!!! It really fixed the problem with garbage code!!!

sanigo said...

But, How can I see the chinese filenames?

Li Ma said...

Sorry, I never figured a way to show Chinese file names in Far.

If anyone knows, please kindly share with me.

Thanks!

sanigo said...

Change the font to Lucida Console, you can see the chinese filenames.

But chinese filenames will make the screen disordered.

sanigo said...

It seems that far manager cannot count the chinese file name length correctly.