git gui - can it be made to display UTF-16?

Is there a way to make git gui display and show diffs for UTF-16 files somehow?

I found some information, but this is mostly referring to the command line rather than the GUI.

I have been working on a much better solution with help from the msysGit people, and have come up with this clean/smudge filter. The filter uses the Gnu file and iconv commands to determine the type of the file, and convert it to and from msysGit's internal UTF-8 format.

This type of Clean/Smudge Filter gives you much more flexibility. It should allow Git to treat your mixed-format files as UTF-8 text in most cases: diffs, merge, git-grep, as well as gitattributes properties like eol-conversion, ident-replacement, and built-in diff patterns.

The diff filter solution outlined above only works for diffs, and so is much more limited.

To set up this filter:

1. Get Gnu libiconv, and file, and install both.
2. Ensure that the GnuWin32\bin directory (usually "C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin") is in your %PATH%

3. Add the following to ~\Git\etc\gitconfig:

   [filter "mixedtext"]
       clean = iconv -sc -f $(file -b --mime-encoding %f) -t utf-8
       smudge = iconv -sc -f utf-8 -t $(file -b --mime-encoding %f)
       required
   

4. Add a line to your global ~/Git/etc/gitattributes or local ~/.gitattributes to handle mixed format text, for example:

   *.txt filter=mixedtext
   

I have used this on a directory with sql files in ANSI, UTF-16, and UTF-8 formats. It is working so far. Barring any surprises, this looks like the 20% effort that could cover 80% of all Windows text format problems.