08 February 2026

putty ncurses ssh windows sles sysadmin

Fix PuTTY: Ugly ncurses Borders in YaST and CLI Apps

Quick one-liner: ncurses borders look like garbage characters (l, q, k, x, m, j) in PuTTY? One checkbox fixes it — enable VT100 line drawing in UTF-8 mode.

🤔 Why This Matters

When you connect to a SLES server from a Linux terminal, ncurses applications like YaST look clean with proper box-drawing borders. But when your customers connect from Windows using PuTTY, those same borders turn into ugly random characters.

The application isn't broken. PuTTY is just rendering UTF-8 line-drawing characters as their raw code page equivalents.

🔧 The Fix

In PuTTY configuration:

  1. Go to Window → Translation
  2. Check "Enable VT100 line drawing even in UTF-8 mode"
  3. Go back to Session and Save your settings
  4. Reconnect

The ncurses borders are beautiful again.

📸 What You'll See

Before (unchecked):

lqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqk
x  YaST2 Control Center  x
mqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqj

After (checked):

┌────────────────────────┐
│  YaST2 Control Center  │
└────────────────────────┘

✅ This Affects