Encoding auto-detection doesn't work in Meld 3.20 when using GUI to select files
Meld 3.16 had a great feature: it detected text encoding according to priority list given by user.
I'm talking about this solution:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38919384/configure-meld-encoding-to-cp-1252
This feature is very important to me:
the files I'm working with are source texts containing a lot of Russian comments and Russian string literals.
Some of my files are encoded in cp1251, others are in UTF-8.
It's not a contrived example: in our TFS repository we indeed store .xml as UTF-8 (for Visual Studio) and .sql as cp1251 (for SQLPlus).
And Meld 3.16 worked just fine: it displayed and compared two files correctly even if they had different encodings!
But it seems that encoding auto-detection was removed from latest Meld.
I tried to use the old good solution
$ gsettings set org.gnome.meld detect-encodings "['UTF-8', 'WINDOWS-1251', 'UTF-16']"
but unfortunately, it doesn't affect Meld anymore (at least since 3.18).
If I understand correctly, in newer versions of Meld I must select encoding manually (when files have encoding different from $LC_CTYPE
).
Why doesn't Meld 3.20 guess the text encoding wisely (like Meld 3.16 did) ?
Almost half of my files are UTF-8, another half is cp1251;
so with Meld 3.20 I have to select encoding manually for every second comparison.
It's really boring, and after trying to work in Meld 3.20 I finally rolled back to Meld 3.16.
The encoding auto-detection is a necessary feature in our globalized world.
Of course, I could write my own wrapper-script which would determine file encoding and export corresponding $LC_CTYPE
prior to running Meld.
But certainly it would be nice to have encoding auto-detection regained in Meld.