It sounds like curses doesn't support unicode I looked around a little bit on google and it looks like if you download the curses source code, there is a way to compile it with unicode support. See the cached page here: http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:hI2PRe3SbOoJ:nullref.se/blog/2006/5/9/ruby-curses-unicode+ruby+unicode+curses&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=safari -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.