'Basic' rendering and no emojis unless Console.OutputEncoding is set to UTF8

[roy-t]

Information

• OS: Windows 11
• Version: 25H2
• Terminal: Powershell 7.5.4 on Windows Terminal 1.23.12811.0
• Spectre.Console 0.51.1

Describe the bug
I've been playing with Spectre.Console on and off for the last three months and I couldn't figure out why a lot of the features look quite basic compared to the example screenshots. Emojis wont work at all, even though just writing those out with Console.WriteLine works fine.

Today I added the following line at the start of my program:

Console.OutputEncoding = Encoding.UTF8;

And all of a sudden everything works. Is this line missing in the quickstart on https://spectreconsole.net/quick-start? Or is this a bug where Spectre.Console doesn't detect the correct output encoding? I assume setting the output encoding to UTF8 might also cause problems when mixing some strings contain UTF16 characters, as that is the default C# string type.

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior.

private static void Main(string[] args)
{
    AnsiConsole.MarkupLine("Hello :globe_showing_europe_africa:!");
}

Will render ??! instead of the globe emojii.

Additional context
This does work:

private static void Main(string[] args)
{
Console.OutputEncoding = Encoding.UTF8;
AnsiConsole.MarkupLine("Hello :globe_showing_europe_africa:!");
}

[patriksvensson]

It's mentioned in the "Best practices" part: https://spectreconsole.net/best-practices

It's not a limitation within Spectre.Console, but a limitation of the terminal's output encoding.

[phil-scott-78]

Before a 1.0 release, it might make sense to just go ahead and set it off if it's detected they are an encoding that will give users trouble. I've been blindly doing it for five years, I'm struggling to think of a downside

[roy-t]

Thanks for the swift reply. I don't think I see setting the encoding via C# is explicitly mentioned. Are there any downsides I should consider? What do other apps do?

[patriksvensson]

You typically want people to set and control their own terminal output encoding. Overriding it could be considered rude.

This is only a problem on Windows as well.

[roy-t]

I feel like I somewhat understand the problem now, but it would be great if we can help developers a bit more. Most will not make an issue and will just abandon this library if it doesn't work out of the box immediately. Still, terminals, shells and text encoding are all complex topics which requires some arcane knowledge. So I hope you can help me with my reasoning.

On my machine the default Console.OutputEncoding seems to be CP-437 which obviously can't output emojis or anything fancy. Even when using Powershell on Windows Terminal. So, even for Windows users that already put effort into getting a better terminal experience will not be able to use Spectre.Console fully without further modifying their OS/terminal settings.

Setting the Console.OutputEncoding to UTF-8 changes the behavior of Console IO functions for the entire program. Doing this without the programmer knowing is quite rude and could be the source of very hard to track down bugs.

So this problem affects probably all Windows users, with Windows being a significant target for .NET applications and to be honest the solution is hard to find. The best practices page is probably not the first thing everybody reads through and even then the information is hidden at the bottom of the page and, to be honest, quite cryptic. It also doesn't contain a solution that allows the developer to fix this for their users, and instead relies on every user of a program that uses the Spectre.Console library to change their terminal settings.

Can we advocate for setting/checking the Console.OutputEncoding setting on the Quick Start page? If the developer is notified of the problem there, and has to set the setting themselves, its not a rude thing, and it would have a much higher chance of being seen. The quick start could link to the best practices page for more information and other work-arounds.