Git is to some extent character encoding agnostic. - The contents of the blob objects are uninterpreted sequences of bytes. There is no encoding translation at the core level. - Path names are encoded in UTF-8 normalization form C. This applies to tree objects, the index file, ref names, as well as path names in command line arguments, environment variables and config files (`.git/config` (see linkgit:git-config[1]), linkgit:gitignore[5], linkgit:gitattributes[5] and linkgit:gitmodules[5]). + Note that Git at the core level treats path names simply as sequences of non-NUL bytes, there are no path name encoding conversions (except on Mac and Windows). Therefore, using non-ASCII path names will mostly work even on platforms and file systems that use legacy extended ASCII encodings. However, repositories created on such systems will not work properly on UTF-8-based systems (e.g. Linux, Mac, Windows) and vice versa. Additionally, many Git-based tools simply assume path names to be UTF-8 and will fail to display other encodings correctly. - Commit log messages are typically encoded in UTF-8, but other extended ASCII encodings are also supported. This includes ISO-8859-x, CP125x and many others, but _not_ UTF-16/32, EBCDIC and CJK multi-byte encodings (GBK, Shift-JIS, Big5, EUC-x, CP9xx etc.). Although we encourage that the commit log messages are encoded in UTF-8, both the core and Git Porcelain are designed not to force UTF-8 on projects. If all participants of a particular project find it more convenient to use legacy encodings, Git does not forbid it. However, there are a few things to keep in mind. . 'git commit' and 'git commit-tree' issue a warning if the commit log message given to it does not look like a valid UTF-8 string, unless you explicitly say your project uses a legacy encoding. The way to say this is to have `i18n.commitEncoding` in `.git/config` file, like this: + ------------ [i18n] commitEncoding = ISO-8859-1 ------------ + Commit objects created with the above setting record the value of `i18n.commitEncoding` in their `encoding` header. This is to help other people who look at them later. Lack of this header implies that the commit log message is encoded in UTF-8. . 'git log', 'git show', 'git blame' and friends look at the `encoding` header of a commit object, and try to re-code the log message into UTF-8 unless otherwise specified. You can specify the desired output encoding with `i18n.logOutputEncoding` in `.git/config` file, like this: + ------------ [i18n] logOutputEncoding = ISO-8859-1 ------------ + If you do not have this configuration variable, the value of `i18n.commitEncoding` is used instead. Note that we deliberately chose not to re-code the commit log message when a commit is made to force UTF-8 at the commit object level, because re-coding to UTF-8 is not necessarily a reversible operation.