Re: console translator set without encoding

[Michal 'hramrach' Suchanek]

On Sat, Jan 22, 2005 at 03:49:51AM +0100, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Ok, so I am not the quickest to respond...
> 
> At Tue, 07 Sep 2004 12:39:06 +0200,
> Patrick Strasser <patrick.strasser@tugraz.at> wrote:
> > CC-ing bug-hurd
> > Ognyan Kulev wrote:
> > > Patrick Strasser wrote:
> > > 
> > >> Unicode did not work until i set it to
> > >> /hurd/console --encoding=UTF-8
> > >> via
> > >> settrans /dev/vcs /hurd/console --encoding=UTF-8
> > > 
> > > 
> > > I think this should be the default.  The change will be in MAKEDEV. Will 
> > > you submit bug for the hurd package?
> > 
> > Then should Unicode be default for the console? I have not printed out a 
> > complete ASCII table on a UTF-8-console without Unicode fonts (anyone 
> > knowing a tool for this?), but at a first glance output seemed to be 
> > quite usefull without ISO8859-1 encoding.
> > 
> > I'm not shure if this is a Debian issue. Why should Debian have  a 
> > different default encoding?
> 
> Is a UTF-8 console the default on Debian GNU/Linux?  If not, why not?
> You may consider thinking about this.

In Debian GNU/Linux you have to choose the default locale during
install, and lately it supports UTF-8 with most languages.
If you do not choose any the default is C beacuse of historical reasons.

I use screen+mutt+irssi+centericq+vim and I have less problems than with
8-bit encodings. I can now read and edit most stuff and do not have to
care about encodings.
There are still some quirks with UTF-8 (ie some programs like centericq
advance the cusor based on the number of bytes, not characters) but it's
easier than managing the different 8-bit encodings.

Thanks

Michal Suchanek