Re: [RFC] Support UTF-8 characters in Git alias names

From: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
Date: Feb 8, 2026, 23:21 UTC
Message-ID: <aYkaepCu4lwT3xNl@fruit.crustytoothpaste.net>
In-Reply-To: <3124b359-2929-4f3f-9ac6-793277fe422b@jontes.page>

On 2026-02-08 at 15:30:02, Jonatan Holmgren wrote:

> 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.

Yes, I don't think anyone should be relying on case folding for aliases. Not doing case folding also avoids locale problems with Turkic languages.

Our mailmap also doesn't do case-folding for non-ASCII characters, so there is some precedent, although I wish we were consistent by not doing case folding at all.

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

I don't think this affects command-line arguments, though, which are just bytes. Since running `git paramétrer` would just be passing `paramétrer` as a command-line argument, then it should pass that value as an unnormalized UTF-8 byte string. It would only be normalized if Git invoked `git-paramétrer` as a binary or script.

I don't think we have any Unicode normalization code at all in Git, though, so if you want a quality implementation, that may be a thing we need.

> Before implementing this, I'd like to hear:
> 
> 1. Is this a feature the project would like?

I think this would be useful. I don't personally plan to use it, but I can imagine a lot of other people would, and in general I'm in favour of better i18n and l10n support.

> 2. Is my implementation approach reasonable?
> 3. What concerns should be addressed in said design?

As I said, Unicode normalization may be a thing you want to support here. Not having it isn't a complete dealbreaker, but it would prevent hard-to-debug breakage.

-- 
brian m. carlson (they/them)
Toronto, Ontario, CA