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

[Ilya Zakharevich]

[A complimentary Cc of this posting was sent to
Eli Zaretskii 
<eliz@gnu.org>], who wrote in article 
<mailman.11664.1210928215.18990.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>:
> > > 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.

That's good enough for me.  So: how I convince Emacs to do the same
without --unibyte?

> > > 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.

I explained it in my first message, did not I?  What more do you want
to hear?  (LANG is undefined.)

For simplicity, you may assume that the user has no idea what is the
encoding of TTY input and output - but the user knows that they match
perfectly (and would remain the same tomorrow).

All user wants to do is to take notes (so they are visible in scratch
buffer), save them to a file, and get they intact next day (using the
same TTY).

> 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?

OK, if this is the simplest case for you to cover: assume that the
user knows that the TTY works in KOI8-r.

> What about the keyboard -- how do you type Cyrillic characters,

This is a TTY.  You have no idea what I do to make it send certain
bytes - and you should not care.

> and what 8-bit codes does your keyboard setup produce?

All of them.  [Assume that 0..0x1f are reserved for standard control chars]

> are they also KOI8-R encoded?

As I said, input and output encodings match.

Hope this helps,
Ilya