Re: Is it possible to use new Emacsen with non-ASCII?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Ilya Zakharevich <nospam-abuse@ilyaz.org>
> Date: Fri, 16 May 2008 07:28:04 +0000 (UTC)
> Bcc: ilya@gnu.org
> Originator: ilya@powdermilk.math.berkeley.edu
> 
> > You need to decide whether you want Emacs or cat.  Emacs is not cat,
> > and cannot be convinced to work like cat.
> 
> Well, with --unibyte it does act as cat.

No, it does not.  What it does is jumping through the hoops to try
very hard to make you _think_ it does.  There's no way to force the
current versions of Emacs not to transform the bytestream it read from
a file on their way to the display.  And since --unibyte is a bastard
option as far as Emacs developers are concerned, it gets almost no
attention in testing and maintenance, and therefore tends to be buggy.
I recommend to stay away of it.

> > Let Emacs work like it was designed to: decode characters when you
> > visit a file and encode them back when it displays them on the screen.
> > Try it, it really works.
> 
> Thanks.  I did.  It did not.

Well, let's hear what you did to customize Emacs, and what problems
you saw.  But again, to give you efficient advice, I need to know what
scripts can your display and keyboard support.  For example, I assume
that you are using a text-mode terminal that can display Cyrillic
letters if it receives them KOI8-R encoded -- is that right?  What
about the keyboard -- how do you type Cyrillic characters, and what
8-bit codes does your keyboard setup produce? are they also KOI8-R
encoded?