Resolving Chinese Character Encoding Issues in Git on Windows

When using Git on Windows, users often encounter garbled Chinese characters in various tools such as Git Bash, CMD, PowerShell, Git GUI, Visual Studio, VS Code, and IDEs, especially with Chinese file paths and commit messages.

Symptoms:

Running git status shows unreadable paths and filenames, and git log displays corrupted commit messages, as illustrated in the screenshots.

Causes:

1. Windows defaults to GB2312 for file names and content, while Git uses UTF‑8. 2. Git’s log output uses the less pager, which is not compatible with Windows encoding. 3. Different terminal tools handle environment variables differently.

Solution: unify UTF‑8 encoding across all components.

Modify Gitconfig

You can set the configuration at the system level (affects all users) or at the global level (affects the current user). In enterprise or server environments, system‑level settings are recommended.

Run the following commands (use --system instead of --global with elevated privileges if needed):

$ git config --global core.quotepath false   # Fix encoding of file paths in git status
$ git config --global gui.encoding utf-8    # GUI Git client encoding
$ git config --global i18n.commit.encoding utf-8   # Commit message encoding
$ git config --global i18n.logoutputencoding utf-8 # Log output encoding

For more details about gitconfig, refer to the FAQ #2.

Modify Environment Variables

Because Git for Windows may be invoked from different terminals, set environment variables accordingly. If you only use one terminal, adjust only that one.

1. For Git Bash, edit C:\Program Files\Git\etc\profile and add: export LESSCHARSET=utf-8 Editing this file also requires elevated permissions.

3. For other Windows terminals such as PowerShell, CMD, and Cmder, set the appropriate environment variables as shown in the screenshot.

Result After Fix

Screenshots demonstrate that Git Bash, CMD, Cmder, and PowerShell now correctly display Chinese characters.

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