The main issue we work around here is that Windows does not have a UTF-8 "code page". Side note: there is actually a code page for UTF-8: 65001 (see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/Intl/code-page-identifiers ). However, when experimenting with it, we ran into a multitude of issues in the Git for Windows project, ranging from various problems with Windows' default console to miscounted file writes. While these issues may have been mitigated in recent Windows 10 versions, older ones (in particular, Windows 7) still seem to have most of them, and Git for Windows specifically still supports even Windows Vista. So from a practical point of view, there is no UTF-8 code page. Karsten Blees (1): gettext: always use UTF-8 on native Windows gettext.c | 4 +++- 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) base-commit: aa25c82427ae70aebf3b8f970f2afd54e9a2a8c6 Published-As: https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/releases/tag/pr-217%2Fdscho%2Fgettext-force-utf-8-on-windows-v1 Fetch-It-Via: git fetch https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git pr-217/dscho/gettext-force-utf-8-on-windows-v1 Pull-Request: https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/pull/217 -- gitgitgadget