perl-unicode

Re: Correct use of UTF-8 under Unix

1999-11-02 13:18:57
On Tue, 2 Nov 1999, Bram Moolenaar wrote:

So, what now?  I certainly would like Vim to be able to handle multiple
encodings.  The easy way out is to let the user set the 'fileencoding' option.
This is actually already working, with these values:
          ansi        default setting, good for most Western languages
          japan       set to use shift-JIS (Windows CP 932) encoding
          korea       set to use Korean DBCS
          prc         use simplified Chinese encoding
          taiwan      use traditional Chinese encoding

For Japan, Shift-JIS is definitely not enough.  You need at least also
EUC-Japan and iso-2022-jp-2.  For the others the situation is similar.
Emacs uses the MIME names, as does Java.

Also, Emacs subdivides your 'fileencoding' into a
'coding-system-for-read' and a 'coding-system-for-write'.

If in doubt, it is a good idea to follow the Emacs naming.  Emacs is
not yet UTF8 based, but it has thouroughly designed multi-coding
capabilities with many years of experience and it is the only
multilingual system that has been in use on Linux.  Therefore it
would also be very helpful, if your vim was able to read the
multilingual encodings used by Emacs: iso-2022-7bit and emacs-mule.

Thanks to Otfried Cheong's conversion frontend, I am currently using
Emacs with the "unicode-utf8" encoding (is that a MIME name?), but
the other two multilingual encodings will keep staying around for
quite a while, since it will take a lot of effort to move the core
of Emacs to Unicode.

--
phm