Comment by 🚀 stack
I did not mean globalism in the political sense. It's just too many god damned codepoints with too many meanings, whereas 99.999% of the time you just need some 8-bit text. In the meantime you have a bloated display architecture, no good way to pre-render character sets without weird caching techiniques, and a loss of ability to count characters by counting bytes.
Also, weird ways to scam the users with similar-looking characters that would never be needed in real life.
2025-10-06 · 7 months ago
2 Later Comments ↓
🦂 zzo38 · 2025-10-06 at 22:04:
I agree with you, those are some of the problems with Unicode, although there are others as well. I write programs (and file formats, protocols, etc) that do not use Unicode (although many programs/etc won't and shouldn't care what character set you are using).
👽 TKurtBond · 2025-10-09 at 21:17:
I use Unicode regulary in text that I compose (I do it in Emacs, and have my own keyboard shortcuts for the characters that I use). It is more convenient than ASCII or Latin 1, etc for me. I agree it is horribly complicated, and wish there was a better way to do things, but it works for me, whether I'm writing reStructuredText, Markdown, Troff/Groff, LaTeX or ConTeXt. I regularly use characters from outside any 8 bit set of codes, and I'm not a heavy user of foreign languages, but I do use some, mostly names and occasional quotes. But there are people who regularly write documents with multiple languages, and 8 bit codes are too limited for them.
Original Post
Unicode shenanigans — How does the gemini protocol handle unicode zero-width emoji manipulation? 😀 This emoji above contains information. Can you decode it? Does gemini preserve...
💬 9 comments · 2025-10-06 · 7 months ago · #gemini #software #tech