[CLI] bug: Terminal output encoding issue / Mojibake with UTF-8 characters (e.g., 'ã' renders as '├ú')

[vitorbonamigosassi]

By using the lore history command, special characters with diacritics (like tildes) are corrupted in the terminal output.

The problem does not occur on lore status or lore commit.

Steps:

1. Create a file and commit with a message containing diacritics (It outputs correctly).
2. Use lore history.
3. Observe broken text.

Environment:

• OS: Windows 11
• Terminal: Bash and Powershell
• Lore Version: 0.8.3

Terminal history:

# Create file
$ touch ãéí.txt

# Stage
$ lore stage ãéí.txt
Staging file system changes
Staging 1 file (0 modified, 1 added, 0 deleted, 0 moved)
Staged repository state 3c2388f76a53...

# Status (displays correctly)
$ lore status
Repository 019edbb506...
...
Changes staged for commit:
A ãéí.txt

# Commit (displays correctly)
$ lore commit "áàÀ"
...
Date      : Thu, 18 Jun 2026 18:48:43 +0000
    áàÀ
Commit succeeded

# History (breaks the characters)
$ lore history
...
Date      : Thu, 18 Jun 2026 18:48:43 +0000
    áàÀ

[arnabnandy7]

Can you try using the following

lore history --no-pager

If that prints correctly, the fix should focus on Windows pager behaviour, not metadata encoding.

[Nox-exe07]

This is likely a UTF-8 encoding bug in lore history. The commit message is stored correctly, but history is decoding or displaying UTF-8 text using the wrong character encoding.

Fix:

Ensure commit messages are always read and displayed as UTF-8.
Compare the implementation of lore history with lore commit and lore status, since those commands display accented characters correctly.
On Windows, make sure the terminal/output stream uses UTF-8 (code page 65001).

Temporary workaround (Windows):
powershell:
chcp 65001

or
powershell:
[Console]::OutputEncoding = [System.Text.UTF8Encoding]::new()

before running:
lore history

If the issue persists after setting UTF-8, the bug is in the lore history command itself and needs to be fixed in the code.

[vitorbonamigosassi]

Can you try using the following

lore history --no-pager

If that prints correctly, the fix should focus on Windows pager behaviour, not metadata encoding.

You are correct, using the --no-pager option displays as expected.

$ lore history --no-pager 1
Revision  : 8
...
Date      : Thu, 18 Jun 2026 18:48:43 +0000
    áàÀ

Although --one-line breaks as well

$ lore history --oneline 1
8 áàÀ

And combined

$ lore history --no-pager --oneline 1
8 áàÀ

[arnabnandy7]

You are correct, using the --no-pager option displays as expected.
Although --one-line breaks as well

So the issue seems isolated to the default Windows pager path, likely interpreting UTF-8 bytes using a non-UTF-8 console/code-page encoding. A fix should probably focus on Windows pager behaviour rather than commit metadata storage/decoding.

[subhramit]

Fix included in #45.

[vitorbonamigosassi]

Thanks

[subhramit]

I think we should keep the issue open till the PR is approved & merged?