From: Jonatan Holmgren <jonatan@jontes.page>
Date: Sun, 08 Feb 2026 15:30:02 GMT
Subject: [RFC] Support UTF-8 characters in Git alias names
Message-ID: <3124b359-2929-4f3f-9ac6-793277fe422b@jontes.page>

Hi Git developers,

I'd like to propose adding support for UTF-8 characters in Git alias 
names to better support non-English speaking users as these are 
currently restricted to [a-zA-Z0-9-] which prevents users from creating 
aliases in languages with other characters. Shell aliases do not solve 
this as the best you could do is "git-förgrena".


This would allow users to set aliases such as:

     git config alias.förgrena branch # Swedish
     git config alias.分支 branch # Chinese

etc.

The restriction comes from iskeychar() in config.c:526-529:

     static inline int iskeychar(int c)
     {
	return isalnum(c) || c == '-';
     }

The function in question validates all Git config keys, not just 
aliases. The git_config_parse_key() function (same file, 543-598) 
enforces this validation and uses tolower(), which only works for ASCII.

I think the best approach is to support UTF-8 specifically for alias.* 
variables, which would mean modifying the git_config_parse_key() fn to 
allow UTF-8 bytes and make non-ascii aliases case-sensitive to avoid 
complex locale-dependent case folding.

The main pain point would be making sure all platforms handle this 
nicely, esp since mac uses NFD and not NFC Unicode.

Before implementing this, I'd like to hear:

1. Is this a feature the project would like?
2. Is my implementation approach reasonable?
3. What concerns should be addressed in said design?
4. Any compat requirements I should be aware of?

Thank you so much for your consideration!

Jonatan Holmgren