raddebugger Terminal Apps don't enter UTF8 mode properly

When launching a Text-UI terminal app that uses UTF8 emojis and special characters, the special characters all render as the 􏿮 tofu character.

In Windows you typically have to enable utf8 mode for terminals explicitly, which the program I was attempting to debug does. I wonder if raddbg is somehow interfering with this?

One possible approach might be to allow users to specify which terminal they'd like their app to open in (Powershell/Windows Terminal/etc).

Might be related to #621

I'm happy to give more detailed info if you need it, but it should be pretty easily reproducible

Nov 19 '25 16:11 Tenari

This should not be affected by debugger in any way. Not sure what you mean by "powershell" here, because powershell is not a terminal, it's a shell. When you run your program under debugger it just launches native process on your .exe. There's no shell involved - no cmd.exe or powershell.exe is running.

If you just want to switch between old conhost vs new wt terminals, then you can do that in Windows settings - System -> Advanced -> Terminal. raddbg will just launch whichever terminal is set there (technically Windows does that for us).

Here's example code that I tried to print out emoji's with old console utf16 api and in newer way of setting utf8 code explicitly, and it works for me just fine:

conhost:

wt:

code:

#include <windows.h>

int main()
{
    HANDLE stdout = GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE);

    WCHAR emoji_utf16[] = {
        L"\xD83D\xDE0A\x2764\xFE0F\xD83D\xDE02\xD83D"
        L"\xDC4D\xD83E\xDD23\xD83D\xDC4C\xD83D\xDE01\n"
    };
    WriteConsoleW(stdout, emoji_utf16, ARRAYSIZE(emoji_utf16), NULL, NULL);

    SetConsoleOutputCP(CP_UTF8);
    char emoji_utf8[] = {
        "\xF0\x9F\x98\x8A\xE2\x9D\xA4\xEF\xB8\x8F"
        "\xF0\x9F\x98\x82\xF0\x9F\x91\x8D\xF0\x9F"
        "\xA4\xA3\xF0\x9F\x91\x8C\xF0\x9F\x98\x81\n"
    };
    DWORD written;
    WriteFile(stdout, emoji_utf8, ARRAYSIZE(emoji_utf8), &written, NULL);

    return 0;
}