Text-mode apps (Was :Who are the "spacists"?)

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Mar 27, 2017 at 4:38 AM, eryk sun <eryksun at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 26, 2017 at 3:37 PM, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Just use Unicode. Everything else, these days, is a subset of Unicode
>> anyway. Unless you're stuck on the default Windows shell/terminal, you
>> should be able to use UTF-8 everywhere and have the entire Unicode
>> range available.
>
> The Windows console can render any character in the BMP, but it
> requires configuring font linking for fallback fonts. It's Windows, so
> of course the supported UTF format is UTF-16. The console's UTF-8
> support (codepage 65001) is too buggy to even consider using it.

Is it actually UTF-16, or is it UCS-2?

> I don't know why you mention the shell. It has nothing to do with
> this. But, for what it's worth, the cmd shell is a Unicode application
> and always has been. It use the console's wide-character API.

Because a lot of people on Windows don't understand the distinction,
and it's common to hear people talk about "cmd.exe" when they really
mean the graphical display. But I'm aware that pedantic correctness
separates them completely.

ChrisA