Git for APLers

Issues with APL characters in filenames

Although Git can deal with Unicode characters, by default it will print non-ASCII file names in quoted octal notation.

For example, the filename ∆UCMD.aplf is represented as \342\210\206UCMD.aplf – the three numbers are octal numbers for the three bytes required to represent the ∆ character.

Now, this is not practical for an APLer, since characters like the del symbol or the quad symbol might well be used for filenames.

Luckily, this can be addressed:

git config core.quotepath off

This changes the settings for the current repository so that ∆UCMD.aplf (unquoted) is returned.

More likely, you want to set it for all your repositories:

git config --global core.quotepath off

Note that your console might use a font that does not support Unicode. This is the case on Windows, for example.

In that case, change the console font to a TrueType font such as Lucida Console or Consolas or "APL385 Unicode".