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   
      
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