Background

This Git for Windows upgrade from v2.8 to v2.11 is an unsuccessful attempt to fix a Jekyll preview error on my another blog triggered by the command jekyll serve for local preview.

Problem

After the update, I can no longer input letters with accents. Since the name of some mathematical theorems have accents, like l’Hôpital’s Rule. It would be very inconvenient if the internation keyboard can’t be used in Git Bash.

Solution

In Git Bash, locale returns several lines. The first one says LANG=C. After viewing the list with locale -a, I’ve finally chosen the most common option with the character encoding UTF-8. To make this change permanent for one user, add the last line into ~/.bashrc.

1
2

# Change Locale Permanently
export LANG=en_US.utf8

Lessons learnt

Many popular URL shorteners like Bitly and Google URL Shortener won’t afftect my SEO, so I can use shortened URLs in the markdown syntax for Octopress codeblocks to save disk space.¹