The file content encoding is clarified with Git 2.34 (Q4 2021):
See commit 1e93770, commit fd680bc (27 Aug 2021) by Jeff King (peff
).
(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster
-- in commit bfe37f3, 10 Sep 2021)
docs
: use "character encoding" to refer to commit-object encoding
Signed-off-by: Jeff King
The word "encoding" can mean a lot of things (e.g., base64 or quoted-printable encoding in emails, HTML entities, URL encoding, and so on).
The documentation for i18n.commitEncoding
and i18n.logOutputEncoding
uses the phrase "character encoding" to make this more clear.
Let's use that phrase in other places to make it clear what kind of encoding we are talking about.
This patch covers the gui.encoding
option, as well as the --encoding
option for git-log
, etc (in this latter case, I word-smithed the sentence a little at the same time).
That, coupled with the mention of iconv
in the --encoding
description, should make this more clear.
git config
now includes in its man page:
Specifies the default character encoding to use for displaying of
So git config gui.encoding utf-8
refers to character encoding, a mean to represent a repertoire of characters by some kind of encoding system that assigns a number to each character for digital representation.
(As opposed to a MIME Content-Transfer-Encoding like base64).