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

[Stefan Sperling <stefan binarchy net>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:

> 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.
>  

That's still very good news. I am looking forward to future versions.

> > 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
>  

I left it out.

> > 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.
>  
If this approach is taken too far, gnome is taking the risk to lose a 
certain type of user base:
When I suggested to a friend of mine to switch from debian woody 
(gnome1) to slackware 9.0 (gnome2),
he complained that he could not permanently remove all the desktop icons 
in gnome anymore. 
From _his_ point of view, a desktop without icons is _not_ broken.
If you do not need a graphical file manger but only a subset of 
features,  like for example the gnome panel, you should not pay the 
performance penalty of a graphical file manager. Maybe there should be 
an option to shut nautilus down entirely by default (if this is not too 
complicated to implement, I don't know much about gnome's internals) as 
it would probably cause quite a performance boost.  Note that this does 
not mean that one should not be able to start nautilus at all after 
setting this option.

There should definitely be a preference option that disables gnome 
behaving like a nanny,  at the user's
own risk. I rather break things myself and fix them than being kindly 
taken by the hand by other
software designers, who are effectively locking doors that should be 
unlocked.  For me this implies a good way to learn about software I use 
(and programming in general), and is one of the numerous reasons I 
prefer open to closed software to an astronomical extend.
I know it is you trying to be kind to non-technical end users, but 
thechnical end users are still out there, too,
and should not be disappointed. Especially in the GNU system with its 
extremly low entry barrier to development
(I myself got sucked into programming by using GNU).

Anyway, I am probably running into open doors here. It is probably quite 
hard to design a desktop environment
that fits both technical and non-technical user's needs.

Before using gnome2, I used wmaker a lot, and I still miss a lot of its 
simple but powerful features, like
spawning apps with customizable keyboard shortcuts - bypassing the mouse 
as the only
interface to GUIs is a very good idea, as it gains users a lot of speed 
who spend most of their time at
the computer typing. I'd really like to see these features in gnome. 
This feature even exists in KDE.
Also, I'd like to be able to log out of gnome with a keyboard shortcut. 
This is possible in gnome 1.4 but not in
gnome 2.2.0! What happened to sawfish? The list of key-bindable actions 
in the metacity version coming with gnome 2.2.0 on slackware 9.0 is 
quite incomplete. The one in gnome-terminal is great though!
I hope the features I describe above are also on schedule but simply not 
done yet in gnome2.

> 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.
>  

Alright, so one can simply add a preferred encoding to the language code 
in LANG.
Nice feature I didn't know about.  I do not have a lot of experience 
setting locales.
I just tried what seemed most obvious to me first. Using 
LANG=en_US.ISO-8859-1 works great.
Thank you very much.


Regards
stefan