UTF-8 support not on the road map?

[Joerg Fischer]

Tim Hubberstey wrote:

> However, most languages that I'm aware of support only 7-bit 
> ASCII for the "active" (non-comment) portion of the language. This 
> limits UTF-8 to, at most, the comments. I'm sure it is desirable to be 
> able to write comments in UTF-8 but ...
> [...] 
> So... Is UTF-8 support actually important for a programmer's editor or 
> is it a "nice to have" feature that can be moved further down the 
> priorities list?

I had a similar opinion.  Unfortunately, most Linux distributions seem
to set the file system to Unicode mode by default.  (This can still be
turned off.)  In this case, NEdit falls back to ASCII for file and
directory names, too.

So far, NEdit relies completely on its environment for encodings, and
these environments do change.  Therefore my opinion changed.  I think
it would be part of a maintenance release to introduce some sort of
Unicode awareness.  This could be done without changing the internal
8bit encoding as first step.  More details are on Niki.

http://nedit.hackvalue.nl/niki/index.php/Unicode_support

In addition, as next step, the internal encoding could be changed from
one byte per character to two byte (fixed-length, eg UCS-2) per
character.  I would expect this to be much simpler than to shuffle
with a variable length per character, and 65536 characters should do
it pretty well.

Jörg