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



Hi stefan,

I don't know if it is a vendor specific feature, but my gnome terminal V2.2.1 on my RH8.0 Ximian Desktop 2 have the option shown on the screenshot you submit. It is in the menu Terminal->Character Coding.

Just to mention it.

Regards,

Fred
--
In a world without fences, who need Gates ?

Stefan Sperling wrote:

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



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