UTF-8 editor support in Debian?
Thinking about the discussion on multilingual package descriptions,
one of the comments was that the encoding ought to be either pure
ASCII or UTF-8.
So what exactly is the state of support for creating UTF-8 files at
the moment? As far as I can tell, few of the text editors support it.
vim doesn't, jed doesn't. nvi has a multibyte version, but doesn't
include the UTF-8 encoding. emacs can manage it, but only under it's
own terms, via mule, not by simply running in a LANG=...UTF-8
environment.
I have my system setup in a UTF-8 environment. Display works fine - I
can read utf8 files, can can type utf8 characters using X's kbd
facilities. But cat makes for a very poor text editor...
What will it take to get the text editors working with utf8?
And is it a good idea to provide support libraries for it too? For
instance, ncurses support for utf8 is supposed to be more or less
stable now, so wouldn't it be a good idea to use the --multibyte
configure flag to provide the multibyte version of ncurses? (this
would fix some utf8 support problems in mutt, for example). slang had
utf8 support for a while, but was pulled since it broke other
packages. But I don't think the utf8 version is available even as an
alternative library, although there was a suggestion to do so.
Can we do more to support UTF-8?
Drew
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