With the UTF-8 locale enabled Altap Salamander 4.0 can work with multiple languages in file names. For example English, Russian and Hebrew simultaneously.In April 2018 with insider build 17035 (nominal build 17134) for Windows 10, a "Beta: Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support" checkbox appeared for setting the locale code page to UTF-8. This allows for calling "narrow" functions, including fopen and SetWindowTextA, with UTF-8 strings. In May 2019 Microsoft added the ability for a program to set the code page to UTF-8 itself, and started recommending that all software do this and use UTF-8 exclusively.
This is still not perfect. For example if I do Ctrl+C and then Ctrl+V on some of non-English named file its name is not properly taken. Seems like a wrong string length calculation (most likely truncates bytes according to amount of UTF-8 chars where the first six chars encoded by 12 bytes) But this is much better than nothing and could be a starting point to add a full Unicode support into Altap Salamander. Also, according to the Wikipedia quote above enabling UTF-8 locale globally isn't necessary and an application, in our case the Altap Salamander itself, could enable the UTF-8 locale for itself programmatically.
What do you think?
I know, Altap don't want to make Salamander's code open source. That's very strange decision but maybe with this support of UTF-8 locale in Windows 10 they could fix it by themselves? I think it should be much easier than the original plan of adding a Unicode support into Salamander without UTF-8 locale.