[Nickle] Re: [OT] Teaching emacs to use utf-8

[Barton C Massey]

In message <878y0z0xpx.wl at cworth.org> you wrote:
> On Fri, 24 Jun 2005 18:36:07 -0700, Keith Packard wrote:
> > Getting emacs to deal with utf-8 is *way* harder.  Ask cworth for
> > details.
> 
> For humor's sake if nothing else, I'll reply without being
> asked. Here's what I eventually came up with:

Thanks!  Incorporated.

> Pretty frightening, ain't it?

Yes.  Yes it is.

BTW, it's not like I had trouble getting gnome-terminal to
deal with UTF8.  The problem is more subtle: I want gnome
terminal to do UTF8, but I want its child locale in the C
locale, lest things like "man" break.  Uggh.

> And in addition to the locale stuff that Keith mentioned earlier,
> there were several other little mystic things I ran into when I made
> the switch. For example, I know have a file ~/.inputrc with contents
> of:
> 
> 	set convert-meta off
> 
> without which, I believe I couldn't get my meta modifier to work in
> the utf-8 locale. There are probably other things that I'd remember if
> I had taken better notes on the process.

I hate locale handling.  I'm increasingly convinced that the
whole notion of a LANG environment variable is just a bad
idea.  Not that I have a great replacement in mind...

> > btw -- .5=A2 is a perfectly usable extension :-)
> 
> I've been tempted to abuse my commit access to the nickle repository
> in that direction for some time now...

Don't you dare.  I have somebody almost roped into porting
Nickle to Windows, and I have a sneaking feeling this would
pretty much queer the deal...

    Bart