Re: UTF-8 filenames

[Jamie Lokier <jamie@shareable.org>]

Norman Diamond wrote:
> Consider
> converting all your ASCII filenames to UTF-16.  Let everyone share the
> short-term pain for the long-term gain.  When you get everyone to agree on
> UTF-16, it will be ugly, but it will be equal for everyone.

UTF-8 is the only sane universal encoding in unix.

UTF-16 is not an option; it's not POSIX compatible, it won't work with
the assumptions made by _all_ unix programs that deal with paths, and
in it won't by useful at all in a unix environment without rewriting
*every single program*.

Also, what would be the point?  UTF-16 as an encoding is about as
complex as UTF-8 (charcters in UTF-16 are 2-4 bytes long depending on
the character), so it's equally hard to program with correctly.

> By the way, another subthread mentioned that stty puts some stuff in the
> kernel that could be done in user space.  In Unix systems the same is true
> for IMEs, stty options specify the encoding of the output of an IME (e.g.
> EUC-JP or SJIS, which then gets forwarded as input to shells, applications,
> etc.), and whether a single backspace (or whatever character deletion
> character) deletes an entire input character instead of just deleting a
> single byte, etc.  I keep forgetting to see if Linux has the same stty
> options.  I haven't needed to set them with stty because if I need to use a
> different locale then I just open a new terminal emulator window using that
> locale.

Do you have a list or description of the specific stty options that
are used?

-- Jamie