Subject: bug#3616: Fwd: [email-masked]

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 05 Mar 2025 16:08:21 +0200

> From: Sean Whitton <[email-masked]>
> Cc: Rui Duan <[email-masked]>, [email-masked]
> Date: Wed, 05 Mar 2025 20:13:59 +0800
> 
> Eli, this is a Windows thing, do you think there is something to
> investigate and fix here, or perhaps this is already captured somewhere
> else?

I think the doc string of 'shell' already spells this out:

  To specify a coding system for converting non-ASCII characters
  in the input and output to the shell, use C-x RET c
  before M-x shell.  You can also specify this with C-x RET p
  in the shell buffer, after you start the shell.
  The default comes from ‘process-coding-system-alist’ and
  ‘default-process-coding-system’.

Setting the correct encoding by default is a hard problem on Windows,
since it is hard to know which process will want what encoding, and
because UTF-8 cannot be easily used due to all kinds of subtle
problems with how we launch subprocesses on Windows.  So I think users
need either to set it manually or customize
process-coding-system-alist for the programs they invoke frequently.

> We should probably close this specific bug

Yes.