RE: multibyte backwarddeletechar

[Borsenkow Andrej <Andrej.Borsenkow@mow.siemens.ru>]

> 
> My first thought is whether it is meaningful to use multibyte glyphs
> on the command line.  And it may well be if, say, people name files
using
> multibyte glyphs and other programs (e.g. ls) display those names.

Yes. We may argue that it is non-portable but you cannot force people to
use ASCII only.

> My second is whether we truly want to handle multibyte glyphs.  I
don't
> think minihacks will work.  It may be a major overhaul.  Not just the
ZLE
> refresh code would need updating but other areas too.


Of course. The whole string handling in zsh must be rewritten. Even
globbing won't work properly any more (`?' is not expected to match more
than one byte and character classes stop working).

The problem is it does mean overhead. I am not sure about proper
implementation. Using wchar looks portable but the immediate problem is
that conventional str* functions stop working. Using UTF-8 is appealing
due to ASCII compatibility but then you get a problem converting from/to
external charset (that implies reimplementing iconv layer for systems
that do have it natively).



-andrej