Re: utf8 patch for mc, slang 2 version

[Bart Oldeman <bartoldeman users sourceforge net>]

On Wed, 14 Jun 2006, Egmont Koblinger wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 07:14:41PM +0200, Tomasz K?oczko wrote:
>
> > BTW: anyone is working on UFT-8 support for ncurses(w) backend ?
>
> I don't think so, and I don't think it is worth it. Maintaining two backends
> IMHO just causes headaches while it doesn't make mc better. I still can't
> see why developers do not decide which one to use and drop the other one.

Maybe compatibility with older UN*Xes with curses but no slang?

> With Unicode support maintaining the two will be much harder since AFAIK
> slang works with UTF-8 while ncurses uses UCS-4. Hence a completely
> different patch would be required for the two cases.

Last time I played with it ncursesw (but not plain ncurses) handled UTF-8 
just fine.

e.g. you can pass a UTF-8 encoded string to addstr(), and provided the
locale is set correctly, ncursesw will compute its width correctly. It is 
*also* possible to use addwstr() with UCS-4, but not compulsory.

Bart