UTF-8 support not on the road map?

[Joerg Fischer]

Zhang Weiwu wrote:

> Until version 1:5.5-2 nedit still tell me "UTF-8 locale is not supported". 
> Searching for old posts it seems no attempt to make it support UTF-8 had 
> been made. (some fix is made to make sure nedit do not crash in UTF-8 
> mode).
> 
> Is there any plan for the future version of nedit? If so is UTF-8 support 
> on the way? Just curious.

The short answer to this is there is no roadmap ;-)

The longer answer is: NEdit is a sophisticated editor with many
features, eg, macro programming.  Therefore, simply displaying foreign
letters or symbols in the edit window won't do.  Notice, nedit can do
so already using the ISO 8bit encodings, but if one tries to use an
encoding where the size of characters isn't fixed one would surely run
into problems with the macro interpreter and not only there, I guess.

Now, to keep it realistic, I suggested to start with Unicode-aware I/O
routines (including clipboard), while letting the internal character
representation at 8bit for now, see 

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

On the discussion page to this, you find the note that nedit couldn't
use GPL'd software.  This is true but I wouldn't pay attention to
this.  I'm confident that sooner or later the Motif libraries will be
released under a GPL compatible license, see

http://marutan.net/cde

Anyway, one always needs someone doing the work, and so far there were
generally too much discussions instead of doing it.  (I must include
myself in this critism concerning the discussion part.)

Cheers,
Jörg