Composing in utf8 from latin1 terminal
Derek Martin
invalid at pizzashack.org
Wed Oct 24 22:30:39 UTC 2018
On Tue, Oct 23, 2018 at 10:31:45PM +0100, Nuno Silva wrote:
> On 2017-10-12, nunojsilva at ist.utl.pt wrote:
>
> > Recently, I have tried to use mutt on a non-utf8 terminal. Everything
> > works as expected in an utf8 environment, but when I compose new e-mails
> > in a latin1/ISO-8859-1 terminal, mutt will expect the file to be in the
> > same encoding as the terminal, while my text editor will save the file
> > in utf8. The result is that non-ASCII characters get misinterpreted,
> > which can affect the message headers as well (e.g. real names in To: and
> > Cc:).
> [...]
> > Is there some way to configure mutt so that it always uses utf8 to read
> > the new message after I exit the editor? Or a way to enable some
> > encoding autodetection that can tell utf8 apart from latin1?
The bottom line is that your environment is misconfigured. If you
want this to work, you need to have LANG set properly at every point
along the execution path. Your terminal, terminal font, editor, and
Mutt all need to know that you're using latin1 instead of Unicode, by
having been started with a latin1 LANG setting. You may need to
configure your terminal to use the correct font, although with many
modern terminals (like gnome-term, kterm, etc.) this should be
unnecessary.
If you are launching the latin1 terminal from a shell that has its
LANG set to UTF-8, it could break (an example of this is starting
hanterm, a terminal program expressly for Korean input with EUC-KR,
with a UTF-8 locale--won't work). If the shell running inside the
terminal has LANG set to UTF-8, both Mutt and your editor could break.
If you have manual settings on any of these programs to override the
locale defined by the environment, it could break. If you don't have
all of these things set the same way, it could, and almost certainly
will break. Sometimes the breakage is subtle, e.g. if you dump the
right characters to a terminal (say, with the cat command) tht has the
right font, it will generally display them correctly, even if the
locale is wrong. But using them with programs that need to know the
locale will still break.
If you're using a Mutt setting to connect to an existing emacs
instance (via emacsclient or similar) that's already running in a
UTF-8 locale, that's broken. You need to start a new instance of
emacs whose locale is latin1.
Lastly, you may need to adjust send_charset in Mutt. It can have
multiple locales, and Mutt will pick the first one that your document
can be displayed in. For example, mine is:
set send_charset="iso-8859-1:utf-8"
If my e-mail contains no characters that need UTF-8, Mutt will choose
to send the message as iso-8859-1, but otherwise as UTF-8.
If you do those things, it should "just work" and if you don't it
won't, at least without jumping through pointless hoops to force it,
which will most likely just break other things.
--
Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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