So, what does 阿部明仁 do in this case?

Polish may be close enough that an approximation is available in English, but there's an awful lot of languages that don't have a large overlap with English characters.

In the Asian case above, if someone with that name did try to "convert to English" they are ironically just as likely to end up with Ａｋｉｈｉｔｏ Ａｂｅ as the ASCII, which will be just as broken!

Assuming that hypothetical guy is an average Japanese male(somewhat leaning right), he'd just turn IME off. Japanese input on desktop is consist of three following states:

- IME On state. IME capture and interpret keypresses as engraved and generate corresponding Kana-Kanji texts.

- IME Off state. IME passes through keypresses as engraved on keytops.

- Direct Input state. IME becomes dormant.

In IME Off state, the keyboard behaves as a plain jp106(or ANSI if it is) keyboard, like I'm doing right now. The cases where you would use conversion with IME on for an English word is when you have reasons for the word to be in "full width"(usually for typesetting reasons).

I don't think it's something that people should 'just know' that when Windows asks them their name during install time, they ought to use 7-bit clean ASCII for everything, no matter where they are in the world or how much they know about other languages. When Windows says "What is your name?", they ought to be able to use their name without things breaking.

I'm sure a computer savvy speaker of a fully-non-Latin language may still guess this is a good idea, but "computer savvy" doesn't cover everyone... and they shouldn't have to.

"Just use 7-bit-clean ASCII English" is not a solution to this problem.

Usernames and passwords are always 7-bit ASCII at least in Japanosphere, to the point it would look odd that you get to log into a computer using their own legal names. To use a computer for any useful purpose as a Japanese, you will have to be able to understand what "English" or "alphanumeric" or "half-width" means, which are non-tech terms for `char str[]`, and be able to constantly and quickly switch IME between ASCII mode and multibyte mode with an at most 2-key combination.

It might be a "you're holding it wrong" situation, but everyone has already learned how to hold it "correctly " - it'll be a disruptive change to default a "natural" hold that you suggest.

They could use a different name as their windows name (Do people use their real names as their usernames? I never do). Or, they would have to go through the pain of finding a real solution, like the author did.

Considering JetBrains seems unwilling to fix this bug, maybe the best solution of all is to switch to an IDE that works.

"You're holding it wrong"

The problem is the technology, not the user using it in a reasonable way. ł is older than computers and the only reason computers struggle with it is lack of foresight or choosing to make things harder for most of the world by some of the people involved early on.

Obviously the IDE is at fault here. Rider has a bug with Unicode.

BUT, there is an easy workaround to avoid all Unicode related bugs: don't use Unicode. If that's morally objectionable for you, then you can keep fighting this fight.

I think it's reasonable to find that morally objectionable: English is the only language* that can be fully represented in ASCII, so pretending that ASCII is all you need excludes a large part of the world.

* yes, by and large. Many languages make do, but even the European languages that use the same script as English cannot be fully represented:

- Pretty much all mainland European languages use accents (simple example, in Spanish el and él are different words)

- French misses ç

- German/Swiss/Austrian misses ß

- Spanish misses ñ

- Dutch misses ij

It's naïve of you to maintain the façade that English can be fully represented in ASCII. We've just had longer than other languages to adapt to that particular encoding technology, and the good luck to have a code set built to represent our language become the lingua franca of computer technology.

A single example is worth more than a thousand slights.

Not even Britain and Ireland can manage with ASCII: they need £ and €.

I agree with you, and disagree strongly with dahfizz, who is essentially telling people their name and language are unacceptable.

Cyrillic-writing countries miss all of their alphabets and so does Greek.

Avoiding unicode, or anything but 7-bit ASCII is like using chiseling text into a stone instead of pen and paper because the pen might break. Fix the pen! Or replace it with a computer (and we're back full circle)!

It is not morally objectionable avoiding, it's just stupid.