Question about unicode support...

[Grzegorz A. H. <gr...@te...>]

Hi there.

I've seen through the poll at sourceforge that unicode support or something
similar is 'brewing' in the mind of SET. I have however some more urgent
needs. At the moment I have some plain text files in utf8 which I would
like to edit. The problem is really at the storege point, because all of
their characters are really in my viewing codepage.

So I could use a script similar to the 'e' alias which before converting
the file converts it to latin1, and when I exit it's converted back to
utf8. It's an ugly hack, and may work for some files. There are may
problems, like what happens if I try to open another file inside the
editor, what happens if the editor crashes (the original is left in
latin), what if the file has non-viewable characters, etc, etc.

I then figured out that it would be nicer to use the manual "recode"
option, which gives me more freedom, and so will I do (for now). But I
also found out that this option is not very customizable, there are a
lot of conversions I do frequently and I would love to add kind of
"shortcuts" to this menu, or even better, trigger them with the macro
menu.

Also, sometimes I would prefer to feed the selected text to an external
program, because I might be doing a character conversion from utf8->latin
which leaves the non-viewable utf characters as html encodings so that I
can convert back to utf8 without loosing characters, and I can customize
much better the conversion through the external program without
requesting more features to the editor :)

Remember SET when I suggested about a combo-key which would word wrap
some lines of text, usually in email posts like this one? Well, you could
use the "feed lines to external program" to solve this, and people could
provide a program doing the formatting, in fact, the basic formatting
could be done with the GNU fmt program. Since only text has to be passed
from setedit to the extension, you could do this with a read/write pipe,
and detect failures with return codes.

Another point, why not add the "decode block quoted printable" to the
"recode" option? Sometimes it may come handy to be able to encode it back
to the mail form. Something similar could be done with the "html accents",
which would reduce the length of the Tools menu.

PD: Resist the temptation to send me copies of your mailing list answers :)

-- 
 Grzegorz Adam Hankiewicz   gr...@te...   http://gradha.infierno.org