Like other would-be users, support by the convert-to-UTF-8-on-open and convert-back-on-save method seems easy enough to me. Can I suggest that you allow user-written plugins for this purpose? People can contribute their plugins and the responsibility for understanding hundreds of character sets and thousands of minor variations will no longer be yours!

My own interest is EBCDIC, the oldest living character set whose usage continues to grow. Used on mainframes and on certain IBM midrange computers, it is a (family of) 8-bit character set(s) that (as your very first comment above noted) is older than ASCII.

Support for simple (user-extendable) conversion and convert-back (for any character set) would get you a lot of extra customers, and would bring you up to the level of your competition.

If you really wanted to support multilingual multi-platform users, and be the ultimate editor, then please add support in such a way that the characters are displayed correctly but still have their native hex bit-patterns available as well. That would enable reading dumps, and other files with mixed text and binary fields, on a Mac using TextMate. But I guess if you consider simple builtin conversion to be difficult, then support for data with mixed non-native text and binary must seem impossible.

Best of luck with the best UTF-8-specific Mac editor around!

Glad to hear you got your encoding needs solved by TextWrangler. Hopefully you’ll give TextMate a second chance when we release 2.0.

For all my love of UTF-8, the corporate website I'm responsible for will stay in Windows-1251 for the foreseeable future to ensure it can be readily edited in any of the windows tools we might want to use. Luckily it seems I'll be able to edit pages on my mac as well should I feel like it, now that I discovered TextWrangler which automates charset detection and saving back to the original format without me having to do as much as a mouse click, let alone typing console commands!

And I guess it'll be easier to use TextWrangler for my personal projects as well, which are of course in UTF-8.

The blog post further shows how you can convert from practically any encoding to any other encoding using the iconv command found on every install of OS X.

As for going UTF-8 only, that actually is something I plan to do, but at the same time introduce import/export callbacks that can do the necessary transcoding for users that need this.

There are also users who keep their log files gzipped, and want to open them in TextMate, or keep them on an sftp server, and want to open them in TextMate, etc. I don’t see anyone calling me arrogant because I haven’t yet addressed these needs…

It is such an arrogance to say "Just use UTF-8" having ensured, with Latin-1, that the problem of legacy encodings doesn't bite you personally (and perhaps your largest market, which incidentally seems to be the one most suffering from the recession right now).

Why don't you put your money where your mouth is and remove support for the Western encodings, leaving just plain ASCII and Unicode? And when your customers start asking for a refund, tell them you don't see what their problem is – everyone should be using UTF-8 by now, right?

Is it possible to use TextMate to help me with these tasks? I suppose, iconv command can be used to change encoding "on the fly", but I don't know how to do that, because I went to Mac OS from Windows recently, so I am not familiar with terminal features.

Honestly, I'm convinced that you could add load/save suport for more encodings in TextMate in less time than it took you to create this page.

I don't see the point in teaching people to use UTF-8 in an editor that claims to be some sort of "culmination" and oriented to "expert scripters and novice users alike/Whether you are a programmer or a designer" when we, expert scripters, programmers, designers and even novice users have often the need to deal with other encodings.

I also don't see the point in teaching us the burden of using iconv, when you could even just create a temporary file and call iconv on it from TextMate itself if you don't feel like using the comfortable OS X API to do it the right way (another thing that could be implemented in less time than it is discussed!).

We are not requesting TextMate to be some sort of Wintel Nero-like feature-overflowed monster app! But supporting load/save in different encodings is something that even TextEdit does!

I myself am a programmer whose applications depart radically from standards (most even take over the OS!), and often I try to teach people to "good habits", but for this reason my apps are clearly labelled for that purposes and don't give the impression of being all-purpose culminations of anything.

I really love TextMate, but I need an all-purpose editor that has at least the same features of TextEdit or Xcode's built-in editor.

Cheers,

MarkUp