Unicode combining and double width chars in Windows Console.

[ghost]

Hi,

I would like to have support for Unicode combining and double width chars in the standard Windows Command Prompt and PowerShell console. I requested this feature before for PDCurses in 2012, see
https://sourceforge.net/p/pdcurses/feature-requests/14/
It was added to ncurses at that time. See http://invisible-island.net/ncurses/NEWS.html#t20121215

best regards,
Erwin

[Bill-Gray]

At present, the Win32 GUI flavor supports fullwidth and combining characters, and SMP (characters past the 64K point). No other flavor, including Win32 console, supports any of these. ncurses has actually supported fullwidth characters since at least 2003 and combining characters since at least 2009, so they're well ahead of us in this department, and probably on the SMP problem as well. (Though personally, I rather prefer the way I handled combining characters to the way ncurses did it.)

The tricks I used to support SMP, fullwidth, and combining characters in Win32 GUI could carry over to other flavors. It is at least possible to show fullwidth characters in cmd.exe. Unicode 'surrogate' characters would, I think, allow display of SMP.

But this has not been a priority. I figured if you wanted "full" Curses capabilities in Microsoft Windows -- resizable windows, above Unicode support, etc. -- you've got the Win32 GUI flavor for Windows. I have thought about extending the X11 version to allow full Unicode support, though "thought" is about as far as I've actually gotten.

[ghost]

I meant the ncurses mingw port supports combining and double width since 2012. For Posix systems it was supported much earlier indeed.

I'm using PDCurses for my wcd program, which is a command line utility to change directory fast. So using the GUI version is not an option for me. It has to run in the command line console. The X11 version is also not of interest for me.
I still prefer PDCurses over Ncurses for Windows, because PDCurses has better screen stability on Windows.

Combining character support in mingw ncurses is not complete yet. The combining character is actually lost. Pdcurses prints a square.