Text Encoding

Fresh automatically detects and handles various text encodings.

How It Works

The in-memory encoding is always UTF-8. Files are converted to UTF-8 when loaded and converted back to the original encoding when saved. The encoding shown in the status bar indicates the on-disk encoding:

• In-memory: always UTF-8 (full Unicode support)
• On-disk: the encoding shown in the status bar
• Changing the status bar encoding changes how the file will be saved

Supported Encodings

• UTF-8 (default)
• UTF-16 LE/BE (with BOM detection)
• Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1)
• Windows-1252, Windows-1250, Windows-1251
• GBK, GB18030 (Chinese)
• Shift-JIS (Japanese)
• EUC-KR (Korean)

Status Bar Indicator

The current encoding is shown in the status bar. Click it to change the encoding.

Fixing Wrong Encoding Detection

Encoding detection is heuristic — Fresh sniffs byte patterns to guess the on-disk encoding, and short or ambiguous files (especially those without any non-ASCII bytes) can end up tagged incorrectly. If a file opens as garbled text, the fix is to reload it with the right encoding:

1. Command Palette: Ctrl+P → type "Reload with Encoding"
2. File Menu: File → Reload with Encoding...
3. Status Bar: Click the encoding indicator

Cyrillic-script files (Windows-1251) with a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters are detected automatically.

File Browser Encoding Toggle

When opening files via the file browser (Ctrl+O):

• Press Alt+E to toggle "Detect Encoding"
• When disabled, you'll be prompted to select an encoding manually

Large File Confirmation

For large files (>10MB) with non-UTF-8 encodings, Fresh shows a confirmation prompt before loading since full re-conversion is required.