# EE - base system text editor and UTF-8



## goshanecr (Apr 16, 2015)

Good day All!

Friends, whether somebody can tell to me, is any work on support of Unicode in text utilities of base system is conducted?

For example it is impossible to edit the text using the excellent ee editor if in this text there are Unicode symbols. Since we have full unicode aware console, is it time to have unicode aware utilites?

Thanks!


----------



## goshanecr (Feb 19, 2016)

UP. About a one year passed, and nobody cares that ee(1) editor from base system not working with UTF-8.


----------



## junovitch@ (Feb 22, 2016)

Have you gotten in touch with the ee(1) upstream yet?  It looks like the last version bump for ee(1) was to version 1.5.2 in https://svnweb.FreeBSD.org/base?view=revision&revision=213567 and that was 6 years ago.


----------



## goshanecr (Feb 22, 2016)

Good day *junovitch@*!

For me ee(1) is easiest editor. I'm tryin various variants from *editors/*, but every editor is so complex for those who not familiar with vim-like controls. I'm just want easy text editor. With UTF-8 support. Maybe somebody knows it?
I'm also trying editors/aee as it advanced version, but it lacks unicode support too.

editor/nano is so non comfortable, that I don't want to use it.


----------



## uzsolt (Feb 22, 2016)

editors/nano, editors/joe, mcedit (part of misc/mc), editors/ne?


----------



## goshanecr (Feb 22, 2016)

uzsolt said:


> editors/nano, editors/joe, mcedit (part of misc/mc)?


Now I try editors/joe and it seems good for me. Only his key-sequences much of which a 3-key length...
misc/mc I try earlier and it also good, with syntax highlighting.

I need to deeply try these editors. Thanks!


----------



## kpa (Feb 22, 2016)

There are some utilities in the base that were designed when one byte character sets were thought to be the end of the development in the area and some of those are very hard to adapt to multibyte character sets, I guess ee(1) falls in that category.


----------



## goshanecr (Feb 24, 2016)

I think I found best replace for ee(1), it is editors/ne.
So thanks for your replies, but of course adding UTF-8 to ee(1) will be best solution


----------



## Kosh2mar (Jun 29, 2018)

Congratulations to all with the release of 11.2, but ee(1)  still does not support UTF-8.


----------



## k.jacker (Jun 29, 2018)

ee is a simple and good fallback editor, not more not less. Really no need for UTF-8 support, there are more then enough other editors.

Also, it displays UTF-8 characters just fine.
And... if you happen to ruin a file that contains UTF-8 characters, just choose to disable 8bit characters from the menu.
UTF-8 characters will then be displayed like <value>, which makes it easy to see where the error is.

If you happen to use a none-english keyboard and get into an emergency situation, e.g. singleuser mode,
ee is the easiest editor when your keyboard isn't configured properly. That's what ee is.


----------

