Hello Egmont, On Tue, 4 Sep 2007 16:16:44 +0200 Egmont Koblinger <egmont uhulinux hu> wrote:
On Tue, Sep 04, 2007 at 03:20:10PM +0200, Pavel Tsekov wrote:Lack of UTF-8 support is a big minus on the part of MC, but I think that your statement is a bit overestimated. It's more like MC is not following the latest trend, IMO.I wouldn't call it 'trend'. Having splash screens, animated widgets, translucent windows, using ajax on the web, blogging etc etc etc. are trends. UTF-8 is the one and only known and sane way of handling all the non-english scripts, hence it's a technical decision. Moreover, mc not supporting UTF-8 doesn't just mean "it doesn't follow trends", it means it's not _working_ correctly in most Linux systems - and that's more serious. As said, modern distros use UTF-8. If you switch back to an 8-bit locale just for mc, you'll have troubles with your text files' content, with filenames etc. - mc will not be compatible with all the other apps. If you switch back globally for your system, you'll only be able to use a very small subset of non-English letters, and you'll still have problems (e.g. when editing .desktop files, using Gtk2 file browser windows etc). If you think of it from a user's point of view, this whole story is simply about "just works" vs. anything else. Obviously vast majority of the users want applications and accented/CJK/etc letters to "just work".
I'd second that, and I'm talking as an IT professional as well as a personal user. UTF-8 is maybe a PITA from a programmer (and sometimes even a user) point of view, but it sounds hard to avoid it nowadays, unless you don't care about many languages. Maybe we would have had the same discussion when color has appeared in terminals (even if I think that UTF-8 is a new dimension that brings more than color, sometimes)? Regards, -- wwp
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