Git messed up my files, showing chinese characters in some places

Question

disclaimer: By Git, I mean \'I\' messed up.

Earlier, I wanted git-gui to show me the diff for which it thinks are binary files.

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Answer 1

Your ini files are saved in UTF-16LE, the encoding that Windows misleadingly describes as ‘Unicode’.

Git's default diffing tools don't work on UTF-16, because it's not an ASCII-compatible encoding. This is why git detected the files as binary originally.

LF/CRLF newline conversion is seeing each 0x0A byte as being a newline, and replacing it with 0x0D-0x0A. But, in a UTF-16LE file, a newline is actually signalled by 0x0A-0x00, and replacing that with 0x0D-0x0A-0x00 means that you've got an odd number of bytes, so the alignment of each two-byte code unit in the next line is out of sync. Consequently every other line gets mangled.

Your options are:

1. Revert the attribute change and let Git handle the files as binary (losing the benefit of diffs).

2. Save the files in an ASCII-compatible encoding. It looks like your content doesn't actually have any non-ASCII characters in, so hopefully that's not a problem? Normally you would want to save all your files as UTF-8 - this is ASCII-compatible but also allows all Unicode characters to be used. But that depends on whether Rainmeter supports reading INI files encoded like that (probably not).

3. Configure git to use a different diff tool, though this will make it more complicated for others to work with your repo.