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Re: UTF-8 editor support in Debian?



On Thu, Jul 05, 2001 at 03:27:24PM +0200, Wichert Akkerman wrote:
> Previously Drew Parsons wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> There are alpha release of vim that support it very well, see
> http://people.debian.org/~wakkerma/vim/ .
> 

Good :)  I'll try it out, thanks.  

> > 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?
> 
> I suspect that will break binary compatibility which is something we
> can't do.
> 

Not so. The --enable-widec flag to ./configure produces
libncursesw.so, so it'll be distinct from the normal libncurses.so.
(they said the UTF-8 support might become standard in ncurses6).

And that'd make it much easier (I suppose) for users (like me :) ) to recompile
mutt against libncursesw.so,  Otherwise they have to recompile both
libncurses as well as mutt.

> > Can we do more to support UTF-8?
> 
> Feel free to submit patches to improve UTF8 support to the various
> programs.
> 

I knew someone was going to say that... ;)

What are the main issues that need to be thought about?  Is it as
simple as using w_char instead of char in the code, or is there more
to it than that?  Can a general "plan of attack" be summarised in a
couple of paragraphs?

Drew

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