Midnight Commander not supporting Russian or Japanese letters

  • Greetings all!
    I'm fairly new to LibreELEC, in the past I've used linux server on my media center with Kodi, vsftpd and transmission-server. I've managed to replicate the same setup now through Docker, it wasn't easy :) but I am satisfied with the results. There is one thing that is bothering me, though; I am listening music from all around the world, and I use mc for on-server file management (i can use shell just fine, it's just faster for me this way), and mc doesn't show japanese or russian cyrilic letters, it shows "???" instead. Listing files from shell shows normal names, as it should in UTF-8 environment. As I poked around a little, I've noticed that mc by default starts in 7-bit ASCII mode, like it's hard-coded. In Options / Display bits you can see that it's the default. You can change that to UTF-8, but nothing changes display-wise, and when you turn off mc and start it again, it reverts to ASCII. I've changed that option manually in .config/mc/ini but when I start mc, it starts in ASCII and changes that setting into ASCII.

    Changing fonts in SSH Client(s) changes just the line drawing of the TUI (as expected, depending on the font), but not the display of proper letters, which was never the problem when I used full linux distribution.
    Can something be done about that? I understand it's just cosmetic, but I can read cyrilic, and to very small extent japanese, so it is helpful if I can see what's on the screen.

  • Hi itisljar - mc has been compiled without wchar support (wide character) thus why it is only displaying the standard ascii table. Of recent times when wchar was introduced, I patched it out. It has been subsequently patched in the upstream version to allow compile with/without wchar support. Technically it can be enabled - but would require some work on the Unicode support.

  • Hello!
    heitbaum , it would be great if next version of mc would be compiled with wchar support. I am willing to test it on my system, to see if it works. It's something that should be enabled by default, IMO, because it is really used all around the world.