[Usability] setting a default character encoding in gnome-terminal

[Stefan Sperling <stefan binarchy net>]

Hi,

I am trying to convince gnome-terminal to use the iso-8859-1 character 
encoding by default. German is my native language. But I am also very 
fluent in english, so me and my computer talk english all day. Still, 
german umlauts and zs's tend to appear on my screen once in a while.

Gnome-terminal notoriously sets its default character encoding to
the current locale (which on my slackware 9.0 system is ANSI_X3.4-1968
according to gnome-terminal.) This does not display umlauts correctly.
I tried setting $LC_CLANG to "iso-8859-1" but that makes no difference.

Setting $LANG is not an option since I do not want my entire system to 
speak german. I just want it to always be able to display german text 
properly without forcing me to grab the mouse and go to the character 
encoding menu everytime I launch a new gnome-terminal (and even the 
launch itself already involves the mouse... but my being annoyed about 
gnome 2.2.0 not knowing about keyboard shortcuts to start applications 
is another issue...)
Apart from gnome-terminal there is no other application having problems 
with umlauts that comes to my mind now...

Searching the internet for assistance, I found a post by Havoc 
Pennington <hp redhat com> (apparently the copyright holder of 
gnome-terminal) from July 14th 2002 to this very list. Here is a quote 
(the link to the png image is still valid as I'm typing):


  Here is a possible gnome-terminal UI which is similar to 			 
Mozilla's but a bit less complex (no autodetect, and no
  More submenu):

    http://pobox.com/~hp/terminal-encoding.png

  The "Add or Remove" dialog is used to change what's in the menu, since
  otherwise the menu would be huge, and too annoying to use (most 		 
users who use this feature will be frequently toggling between acouple 
   of encodings).
  In addition to what's visible in the screenshot, there would be 		  a 
per-profile "default encoding" setting, used for new windows.



Unfortunately the "default encoding" setting is not in any of my 
gnome-terminal's profile menus.... is this a pending feature that has 
not yet been added (I am using gnome-terminal 2.2.1) or has it 
deliberately been left out?

Is there another way to solve this problem?
Why does gnome-terminal ignore my LC_CTYPE environment variable?
And why is the terminal encodings menu only partially customizable?
That is: Why can't I simply remove the two encodings "Current Locale" 
and "Unicode" from the encodings menu if I don't need them, leaving the 
menu with the single entry "ISO-8859-1"?

To me this begins to smell a little like a violation of the traditional 
UNIX principle of least surprise.... :(
May be the gnome-terminal authors need to take a rest from hacking to 
read Eric S. Raymond's new book ;) 
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/
(Now, don't get me wrong, gnome-terminal really IS my favourite terminal 
emulator because of all its numerous other nifty features, eg brilliant 
curses integration, multiple sessions in a single window, a very nice 
default font and light speed - only transparent background is a bit slow...)

Or maybe I have just not tried hard enough? Or I need the very latest
version? Any response is welcome.

Regards
stefan