The thing is, this probably isn't actually a bug, but rather a misfeature, and the "it's not a bug, it's a feature" mentality is probably responsible for the fact that it has gone unfixed so long. I see no evidence that the behavior gedit exhibits here wasn't intended. If it *were* a bug, it would be a lot more excusable, and probably would have been fixed upstream by now. (It's been around for over *six years*. The bug report for it on the GNOME site dates back to '04).
I can easily see what the misfeature in question was intended for: "Protect the noobs from trashing their binaries by editing them in gedit". But at the same time, it renders any text file that has been misprocessed by an other program in such a way as to insert control characters unreadable in gedit. *Every other* text editor I've used, whether generally superior to gedit, or generally inferior to it (e.g. Notepad) operates on the garbage-in -> garbage-out principal when it comes to opening binary files. This is the natural behavior of a text editor, and *not* operating on the GIGO principle requires extra effort. Furthermore, violating the GIGO principle in the fashion that gedit does ends up doing more harm than good. Gedit is otherwise a solid text editor, but this problem, whether we call it a bug or a misfeature, is a horrible annoyance that has not been fixed in almost six years, and really needs to be fixed yesterday. Unless upstream will be making a release that fixes it within a concrete and *short* time period (no more than a few months), it needs to be fixed downstream ASAP (rather than after another 6 years of thumb- twiddling). Even the current behavior would be acceptable if there were just a "Open the file anyways" button. Even a "--force-open" command line switch would be better than nothing. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Desktop Bugs, which is a bug assignee. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/75151 Title: Refuses to open files where the character encoding is not recognised -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs
