I'm pretty sure I had this problem in the past on windows but can't remember, and I have searched google for hours and even their issues list on github and saw nothing. when running parcel index.html or parcel serve index.html with a boilerplate html file even (the basic one any editor makes by default) i get this output:
Opening the file it built in a text editor looks like this gibberish:
does anyone know why it does this, I have been at this for hours to no avail
well after 5 hours of a frustrating fight, and help from a friend using a mac he noticed on the mac that my vs code had saved the file as utf-16 instead of utf-8 and that was the cause. after forcing vs code to re save it in utf-8 it fixed it.
what a day