Re: [PATCH 2/2] Make it possible to update git_wcwidth()

Peter Krefting [off-list ref] writes:

Torsten Bögershausen:

quoted

The function git_wcwidth() returns for a given unicode code point the
width on the display:
-1 for control characters,
0 for combining or other non-visible code points
1 for e.g. ASCII
2 for double-width code points.

This all looks sane, but the problem is that this is also
context-dependent since there are a lot of characters with "ambiguous"
widths, i.e., characters that are "double" width for CJK locales (and
fonts), but "single" width for others. This includes Greek and
Cyrillic characters, which are encoded using the double-byte parts of
the CJK DBCS encodings.

I'm not quite sure how much impact this would have on day-to-day Git
operation in a CJK locale, however, as I guess they would mostly
encounter texts in their own language (which would mostly be "double"
width) or English (which would be unambiguously "single" width).

Anyone on the list running Git in a CJK locale that would like to
weigh in here?

The issue does appear in the real life.  A solution I've seen used
in a terminaul emulator program was to give the user a choice to say
"I want ambiguous ones to be treated as double (or single)".  As a
J-locale user, I naturally set the configuration to double while
using that program (I no longer do).