Re: Unicode support in Zle

[Phillip Vandry <vandry@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, May 07, 2003 at 12:08:17PM +0200, Oliver Kiddle wrote:
> The main advantage of the libc functions is that they work for other
> multi-byte encodings than utf-8. They also do a lot of work for you but
> don't let that stop you reproducing it if you want.

You're right. Actually I believe I'm going to switch to the libc functions,
with compatibility functions conditionally compiled if they're not
available.

> > - To enable the functionality to work on systems where Unicode is not
> > handled at all in the system's libc & ascociated libraries. I still
> 
> On the basis that such systems won't have utf-8 handling xterms,
> filesystems or anything else, I'm sceptical about the value of that.

I am almost always remotely logged in to such systems, with my xterm &
fonts available on the local machine. So there is value.

> Besides these comments, this all sounds very good. I look forward to
> hearing about further progress.

The biggest issue I've run into is [re]drawing the command line on the
screen if wide characters are used. Zsh tries to use termcap tricks like
deleting and inserting characters, but I found that different terminals
react to these commands in different ways for wide characters. For
example in xterm you need to delete two characters to delete a wide
character. In mlterm deleting a single character if the cursor is on a
wide character deletes it, and shifts the text by two cells. Currently
I deal with this unpredictability by suppressing the delete character
functionality if there are wide characters. I can't wait to find out
how different terminals handle combining characters!

-Phil