At the core level, git is character encoding agnostic. - The pathnames recorded in the index and in the tree objects are treated as uninterpreted sequences of non-NUL bytes. What readdir(2) returns are what are recorded and compared with the data git keeps track of, which in turn are expected to be what lstat(2) and creat(2) accepts. There is no such thing as pathname encoding translation. - The contents of the blob objects are uninterpreted sequence of bytes. There is no encoding translation at the core level. - The commit log messages are uninterpreted sequence of non-NUL bytes. Although we encourage that the commit log messages are encoded in UTF-8, both the core and git Porcelain are designed not to force UTF-8 on projects. If all participants of a particular project find it more convenient to use legacy encodings, git does not forbid it. However, there are a few things to keep in mind. . `git-commit-tree` (hence, `git-commit` which uses it) issues an warning if the commit log message given to it does not look like a valid UTF-8 string, unless you explicitly say your project uses a legacy encoding. The way to say this is to have i18n.commitencoding in `.git/config` file, like this: + ------------ [i18n] commitencoding = ISO-8859-1 ------------ + Commit objects created with the above setting record the value of `i18n.commitencoding` in its `encoding` header. This is to help other people who look at them later. Lack of this header implies that the commit log message is encoded in UTF-8. . `git-log`, `git-show` and friends looks at the `encoding` header of a commit object, and tries to re-code the log message into UTF-8 unless otherwise specified. You can specify the desired output encoding with `i18n.logoutputencoding` in `.git/config` file, like this: + ------------ [i18n] logoutputencoding = ISO-8859-1 ------------ + If you do not have this configuration variable, the value of `i18n.commitencoding` is used instead. Note that we deliberately chose not to re-code the commit log message when a commit is made to force UTF-8 at the commit object level, because re-coding to UTF-8 is not necessarily a reversible operation.