Monday, January 14, 2019

Re: Dropping the multi-byte feature?

I wrote:

> Currently it's still possible to build Vim without multi-byte support.
> This leads to a large number of #ifdefs. And is a text editor without
> multi-byte support still useful these days?
>
> The main reason to keep the multi-byte support optional is code size.
> The functionality of 8-bit editing is always available, if Vim is built
> with multi-byte support one can always set 'encoding' to "latin1" to
> edit with 8-bit characters.
>
> A change in behavior would be noticed for when a tiny Vim was used,
> which resulted in 'encoding' defaulting to "latin1". With the feature
> included for many systems it would result in 'encoding' defaulting to
> "utf-8". Nearly everything will still work though, also when editing
> latin1 text or a binary file.
>
> At least on Ubuntu, the smallest Vim distributed is vim.tiny, which does
> include the multi-byte features.

Note that once condition is that the EBCDIC feature is dropped. This
feature makes it possible to compile Vim in EBCDIC mode, which is a
compile time choice that conflicts with FEAT_MBYTE. As far as I know
hardly anyone uses the EBCDIC feature. The last patch related to EBCDIC
was Patch 8.0.0173 (I have emailed the reporter of the problem).
Probably the only system where this is used is on z/OS with Linux.

This is not related to the ability to edit files with EBCDIC encoding,
you can use conversion for that.

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