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Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2014 05:33:22 -0500
From: Andrew Berg <aberg010@my.hennepintech.edu>
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Subject: Re: cmd.exe on WIndows - problem with displaying some Unicode characters
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On 2014.08.04 04:46, Glenn Linderman wrote:
> How does one "directly run" another application using ConEmu? That wasn't clear
> from what I found to read. It sounded like you run ConEmu, run one or more
> shells within it, and launch programs from those shells? And so it was also
> unclear if a program launched from some batch file would have to have the batch
> file launched from ConEmu, also. Or does ConEmu grab the execution association
> for batch files to make that work more automatically?
When you open a new console, the dialog will ask you to supply a path to an
executable you want to run. Any arbitrary CLI application will work. I don't
understand your question about batch files. If you mean to ask if ConEmu will
snatch a console opened by executing a batch file outside of ConEmu, yes, it
can do that. I highly suggest actually using the program and doing some tests
of your own to see how it works.

>> ConEmu can use any arbitrary font available on the system. As I have
>> said, I have been able to display Unicode output on it from an application
>> written in Python. No mojibake, no replacement characters, just the exact
>> characters one would expect.
>> I do not know the internals of ConEmu and how it interacts with conhost and
>> whatever else, but I have not found a need to since it has just worked for me.
> So you may not know the internals of ConEmu, but I presume you know the
> internals of your Python applications. What encodings do you use for stdout for
> those applications? Do you set up the Python environment variables that specify
> some particular encoding, in the ConEmu environment (or does it)? Because the
> default Python IO encoding in Windows seems to be obtained from the configured
> code page.
I use UTF-8. Open the Python interpreter directly in ConEmu and see what you get.

> Of course the biggest problem with much free and open source software is the
> documentation; I wasn't able to find specific answers to all my questions by
> reading the ConEmu wiki. Maybe some of it would be clearer if I installed it,
> and your "just worked" comment is certainly encouraging me to "just try it",
> but while trying it may help me figure it out, adding another package to
> separately install for my users gives more complexity. See if you can push me
> over the edge :)
It certainly would make things much clearer if you were to actually use the
program. Documentation tends to assume (and reasonably so, IMO) that you intend
to do some hands-on learning.
I can give no advice on deploying this to your users other than to say ConEmu
works well as a tool for command line power users on Windows, but does not
provide much ROI when it is simply an implementation detail for a single
program. If you want to save your users the hassle, I would definitely
recommend a graphical environment. If I had realized that you intended your
application to be widely deployed, I would have simply recommended that from
the start.

On a side note, you would have run into similar issues on *nix systems where a
significant amount of your users would be using the "C" locale and have no idea
what it is, why it causes them problems, or how to change it.