When I open a file whose character encoding can't be determined, maybe it can be assumed to be UTF-8 and display whatever can be. I have tried to open some self-extracting installer shell-scripts to alter them a bit to my needs and Geany doesn't open them saying the character encoding can't be determined.
Notepad++, for example, opens such files assuming UTF-8 encoding and displays unknown characters as "NUL". I find this feature very useful.
Geany does not open files containing NULs because a lot of the code uses C NUL terminated string libraries, so a lot of functionality is likely to not work or not work correctly for a file with NULs in it.
At the moment changing this is unlikely to happen.
Duplicate of #618, #1508, #1708, and others.
Also the work has already been started in #1709. I'm sure help would be appreciated in testing and developing it to completion.
Closed #2081.
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