Hello andrew,

On 06 Jun 15 21:15, andrew clarke wrote to Nicholas Boel:

 ac> It supports writing UTF-8 messages, provided a UTF-8 capable external
 ac> editor is used, as you say, but that's about it.

At least that's as much as I've uncovered so far. Thanks for verifying.

 ac> Non-ASCII UTF-8 messages will always be garbled in GoldED (also Msged,
 ac> timEd). You can try rebuilding GoldED "make WIDE_NCURSES=1" but it
 ac> only helps very marginally. Part of the reason is because GoldED (and
 ac> probably the other two) is mostly using Curses' mvaddch() for
 ac> displaying characters on the screen one byte at a time, when UTF-8
 ac> expects multibyte encoding.

Exactly. I have compiled it with WIDE_NCURSES=1 and as you say, it doesn't help
much. I also tried compiling with iconv support (which I don't think was ever 
considered "stable" anyways) only to end up with many more headaches. So I 
disabled that and recompiled without it.

 ac> It's not impossible to fix GoldED but I don't think it's practical,
 ac> plus it wouldn't help on Windows & OS/2, where Curses isn't used and
 ac> UTF-8 console subsystem support for textmode apps is either poor or
 ac> non-existant. A GUI app on those two platforms is really the only way
 ac> you can get good UTF-8 output AFAIK.

Yep.

 ac> In a lot of ways GoldED etc is overkill these days. I think the way
 ac> forward is to write a simple line oriented reader (similar to
 ac> /usr/bin/mail) that's UTF-8 clean from the start, then build on top of
 ac> that if you want a CUI or GUI.

True. I don't use probably 90% of it's capabilities. There's a couple nice ALT 
sequences that I'm used to using and that's about it. I can change my config 
back and forth between CP437 and UTF-8, but other than that.. I don't need much
else.

I believe I've had a discussion or two with a couple Russian sysops in regards 
to this, so I have a feeling there's already some decent stuff out there. I 
just have to try to remember who it was I talked to about it. :)

Regards,
Nick

--- GoldED+/LNX 1.1.5-b20130910