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

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Wed, 2003-09-17 at 17:28, Stefan Sperling wrote:
> 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?

It just isn't done yet. I think there may be a patch in bugzilla that
was delayed due to the 2.4 freeze, but I could be wrong.

> Why does gnome-terminal ignore my LC_CTYPE environment variable?

LC_CTYPE=de_DE.ISO-8859-1 should work, did you leave out the de_DE part?
or en_US.ISO-8859-1

> 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"?

Basically the idea there is to avoid allowing users to create a broken
state (there are always two sane choices). If your current locale is
UTF-8 there's only one choice given, the two defaults get merged.

In your case, I think setting LC_CTYPE and adding an encoding to the
menu are really wrong; you should be using LANG=en_US.ISO-8859-1, not
LANG=C, then use the Current Locale option.

LANG=C is ASCII encoding, which is pretty useless. If you want C locale
sorting just set LC_COLLATE=C, english messages set LANG=en_US. Red Hat
Linux for example will never set LANG=C (or at least if it does it's a
bug).

Havoc