Add support for ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) encoding – open, edit, and save

[davidfcopozo]

What are you proposing?

Add native support for opening, editing, and saving files encoded in ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1), including the ability to switch to this encoding from the status bar or command palette.

Why does this matter?

ISO-8859-1 is one of the most widely used legacy encodings in Western European languages (Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, etc.). Without support for it, Zed is unable to correctly open a large number of real-world files, making it impractical for anyone working with:

• Legacy source code and configuration files
• Data exports from older databases and enterprise systems
• Files created in environments where Latin-1 was the historical default (older Linux/Unix systems, early web projects, etc.)

Currently, Zed throws an error or displays garbled characters when encountering these files, forcing users to convert them externally just to open them.

Are there any examples or context?

VS Code handles this gracefully with two dedicated commands:

• Reopen with Encoding — interprets the current file bytes using a selected encoding
• Save with Encoding — writes the file back using the chosen encoding

Both are accessible from the command palette and the status bar, making the workflow intuitive.

Sublime Text and Notepad++ also support encoding switching from the status bar or menu, and can auto-detect encoding on file open.

Possible approach

• Extend the existing status bar encoding button (added in v0.219) to allow switching to ISO-8859-1, not just displaying the current encoding.
• Add two command palette actions: buffer: reopen with encoding and buffer: save with encoding, similar to VS Code.
• Use a library like encoding_rs (already common in the Rust ecosystem) to handle the encoding/decoding layer.
• ISO-8859-1 is a superset of ASCII and one of the simpler encodings to implement, making it a good starting point before tackling more complex ones like Shift-JIS or Big5.