Set Encoding functionality
I am in the process of changing all files on my computer system from ISO 8859-1 to UTF-8. This is a slow, manual process because I rather want to make everything right, than miss something; but anyway, the suggestion here is about geany.
Right now if you wish to change the encoding to UTF-8, you have to do this (at the least via the main menu interface):
Go to:
Document -> Set Encoding -> Encoding -> Unicode (UTF 8)
This is too much work, in my opinion; but the even bigger issue is that many of the encodings I will, quite honestly, never need.
So my feature request here is - could this be improved?
Now I understand that for different people they may prefer to use other encodings than I do, so geany has to be flexible - no problem here.
I will make some suggestions next - please feel free to pick up on any idea that is deemed useful, and discard the others:
1) Sort the entries there alphabetically. I think this would help avoid any confusion. Right now "SE Asian" appears before "Unicode" and "West European" appears on top. Which suits me of course, since I am in Europe too, but ... I'd rather prefer alphabetical listing. Or as an option (but it may be better to be more consistent). This is not so important though.
2) I would suggest adding a short list of drop-downs here, e.g. the "top 3" or something. For example, if a user selects the main encoding more than 5 times then geany could realize that this may be a common operation - so what could then happen? That entry could appear on the bottom of that side-pane (not sure how it is called ... some gtk menu entry or gtk radio label button or something like that).
This new entry could have the same name as normal such as Unicode (UTF-8) and it would allow users to quickly change the encoding after having done so a few times before. That would save me a little work.
3) Perhaps a shortcut could be assigned somewhere easily; ideally some key combination for this task (right now I have not figured out whether this is possible right now, so disregard if it is; I am learning geany slowly as I go; am far from expert level right now).
4) Perhaps intercept on right click mouse button context menu, with some option to add this to some default keybinding or something from there.
Anyway - these are mostly just semi-random ideas. The more general comment is that it may be useful to improve geany here, since I think this may be a task that a few people may have to do every now and then (e. g. when having downloaded some files or working with legacy files, although geany also already seems to have an option to load up files in a specific encoding, which is nice; but this does not seem to work or perhaps I haven't fully understood it, since the bottom status still shows encoding :iso something, even when i save it; right now I have to manually change the encoding on every file like that. It works but is slow.)