Re: package description : cocot

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Justin B Rye wrote:
>   Description: terminal encoding converter

I suspect the focus on ssh is because Windows users don’t tend to
need such a converter for other applications.

To some users, TTY will mean “text telephone for the deaf”.  For
such users, it would be easier to understand the word “terminal”
which is at least alluded to by the name of xterm, kterm,
gnome-terminal, and so on.

Once I was on a university machine with no UTF-8 locales set up (which
is the default in lenny, I think) and wanted to use ‘git log’;
unfortunately, the latter expects a UTF-8 terminal.  luit couldn’t
help.  If ‘aptitude search '~dluit'’ had noticed this program, maybe
that would have simplified my life a little.

Shamelessly adapting the beginning of the DESCRIPTION in luit(1):

   This program is a filter that can be run between an arbitrary
   application and a terminal.  It will convert application output
   from an encoding the application supports to the terminal's
   encoding and convert terminal input to the encoding the application
   supports.  The name "cocot" is an abbreviation of "COde COnverter
   on Tty".
   .
   Unlike luit from x11-tools, cocot does not respect requests by the
   application to switch encodings.  In general, when using a UTF-8
   terminal, luit is probably a better choice.  However, unlike luit,
   cocot supports using an arbitrary encoding for the terminal as well
   as the application.
   .
   cocot has special support for the EUC-JP, Shift_JIS, and CP932
   encodings.  Other conversions rely on the C library's iconv
   facility.
   .
   If you use ssh to connect from accounts which use different encodings
   on several machines, this package is what you need.

Hope that helps,
Jonathan