How to configure git encoding for German Umlaute on Ubuntu and Windows?

Question

I noticed that commit messages that contain German Umlaute are not displayed correctly when I run git log in Git Bash on Windows. Those commits were made on Ubuntu using the Terminal . Normally, commit messages are written in English but when it comes to names there is no way around, eg Added library by Simon Jünker. I guess it can also be Git Bash which cannot handle the character encoding. But maybe there is a setting to force utf-8 encoding for writing and displaying text in any module ( Git Gui , Git k ) of Git.

What is your multi-platform character encoding setup for Git? Please, make sure to include the configuration for both platforms in your answer. You can also add MacOS.

Answer 1

This link showed the way to solve this issue:

Please try:

set LESSCHARSET=UTF-8

in the Windows command Shell (cmd.exe) and run the git commands again.

Answer 2

On Mac OS X things should work fine with the built-in terminal as long as you have the encoding set in Preferences > Settings > Advanced and you've selected “Set locale environment variables on startup.” (These are the defaults.)

Apparently MSysGit on Windows doesn't support UTF-8, but if you pipe git command output through a copy of less from cygwin things will work. There's some useful info in the msysgit Google Group .