Encodings and line endings

A text file is just bytes; its encoding says which bytes mean which characters. Today almost everything is UTF-8, but older files, and files from some Windows programs, use other encodings. Ettin Edit reads and writes all the common ones.

How Ettin Edit picks an encoding

When a file opens, Ettin Edit looks for, in order:

1. a byte-order mark (BOM) at the start, which names UTF-8 or UTF-16 for certain;
2. text that is valid UTF-8;
3. UTF-16 without a BOM;
4. failing those, the most likely legacy encoding, such as Windows-1252, Windows-1251 or Shift_JIS.

The encoding is shown on the status bar, and the file is saved in the same one, with or without a BOM just as it was. If some bytes don't make sense in the encoding it chose, Ettin Edit says so and shows them as �. Saving would replace them with �, so if the text looks wrong, use Reopen With (below) first.

Binary files (with a 00 byte near the start that isn't UTF-16) aren't read as text at all: they open in Hex View.

The Encoding menu

Open it from the menu bar or by clicking the encoding on the status bar.

Save as (the top of the menu) changes the encoding the tab will be saved in. The text you see doesn't change; the next save writes it in the new encoding. The choices are:

• UTF-8, UTF-8 with BOM, UTF-16 LE and UTF-16 BE;
• about 35 older encodings, grouped by region: Western European (Windows-1252, ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-15, Mac Roman…), Central European, Cyrillic (including KOI8-R and KOI8-U), Greek, Turkish, Baltic, Nordic, Hebrew, Arabic, Vietnamese, Thai, Romanian, Chinese (GBK, GB18030, Big5), Japanese (Shift_JIS, EUC-JP, ISO-2022-JP) and Korean (EUC-KR).

If the text contains a character the new encoding can't hold, such as € in ISO-8859-1, saving stops and tells you which character and where. Nothing is lost.

Reopen With reads the file from disk again in the encoding you pick. Use it when Ettin Edit guessed wrong and the text looks garbled, for example é where there should be é. It's only available for saved files, and you can undo it.

New tabs use the encoding set in Preferences > New Documents, UTF-8 unless you change it.

Line endings

Lines end with LF on Linux and macOS, and CR LF on Windows; very old Mac files use CR. Ettin Edit detects the ending a file uses and keeps it when saving, so editing a Windows file on Linux doesn't change every line.

Click the line ending on the status bar, Unix (LF), Windows (CR LF) or Macintosh (CR), to convert the whole document to another. View > Show Symbol > Show End of Line shows each line's ending.

New tabs use the line ending set in Preferences > New Documents: your system's usual one unless you change it.

Chinese, Japanese and Korean text

Ettin Edit's own fonts don't include Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters, so it uses a CJK font installed on your system for them, such as Noto Sans CJK on Linux or Microsoft YaHei on Windows. If those characters show as boxes, install a CJK font.