Gedit Review (Softpedia.com) [LWN.net]

Gedit Review (Softpedia.com)

Posted Jun 13, 2006 6:12 UTC (Tue) by halla (subscriber, #14185)
In reply to: Gedit Review (Softpedia.com) by khim
Parent article: Gedit Review (Softpedia.com)

If Gedit assumes that a file is utf8 when LC_CTYPE is not set to something.UTF-8 (like
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8) looks like seriously broken behaviour to me. And if LC_CTYPE is set
correctly (as it should have been set by your distribution), then Kate will certainly show your text
correctly, konsole will show your text correctly if you cat it, vim will show your text correctly --
in fact, only Nedit might have trouble. Unless Nedit improved a lot in the last year.

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Gedit Review (Softpedia.com)

Posted Jun 13, 2006 14:45 UTC (Tue) by jpetso (subscriber, #36230) [Link]

> If Gedit assumes that a file is utf8 when LC_CTYPE is not set to
> something.UTF-8 (like LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8) looks like seriously
> broken behaviour to me.

Well, but it's a fact that not every file corresponds to your local
LC_CTYPE settings. For example, my newer text files (since I switched to
Kubuntu) are encoded in UTF-8, and the ones from my Gentoo age and before
still are ISO-8895-1. Also, everything that involves other people can't
be fixed to the one correct encoding. KDE svn might use UTF-8 files while
group projects at university courses often involve ISO-8895-1 ones.
Also, web pages are quite differently encoded, even if XHTML pages
specify their own encoding.

Opening text files based on an environment variable is broken by design.
Only new files should be created with regard to LC_CTYPE, whereas
existing ones should be checked on their encoding.