I faced the problem that I was using a zsh with my normal user and changed into root, suddenly all escape sequences didn’t work anymore and tools like mc wece unusable.

I found out my locale settings didn’t match, root used en_US.utf8, my normal user did not have anything set and used POSIX.

To set the LANG variable I put it in .zshenv, this way I did not need to edit my .zshrc, which I copy from grml.org.

Put this line into $HOME/.zshenv for it to work:

export LANG=en_US.utf8