Let git and tortoisegit support Chinese file names/UTF-8 in Windows

Because msysgit and tortoisegit have officially supported UTF-8, the content of this article is for reference only.

Git is the most widely used distributed version management system with powerful functions and fast speed.

Git was originally unavailable for Windows and is now widely used in msysgit, a new porting project. Msysgit has improved support for git functions, and the only problem is poor support for Chinese file names. A similar problem exists on mercurial and tortoisehg. See "Let mercurial and tortoisehg support Chinese file names/UTF-8". In short, using git in Windows has the following problems:

• The library generated in Windows is different from that in Linux. The file name encoding is incompatible, leading to garbled file names.
• Libraries in Windows and Linux cannot be referenced from each other.
• The libraries generated by windows in different languages are also incompatible and cannot be referenced from each other.

This is really a serious problem, especially for products that require internationalization or cross-platform access.

 

I modified git and tortoisegit code so that they both use UTF-8 encoding directly to store file names to stay consistent with Linux. The modified version can be downloaded at http://code.google.com/p/utf8-git-on-windows/downloads. I have been using this version for a while, and the basic functions can be used normally. Tortoisegit: