Unicode in Emacs
Hi linux-utf8, hi Richard, On Wed, 24 Oct 2001, D. Dale Gulledge wrote: Now we come to the Emacs issue. The characters in UTF-8 and ISO 8859-x have not been unified in Emacs' internal representation. Thus, to insert the same character in UTF-8 or ISO 8859-3 requires inserting a different character into the buffer. rant Emacs MULE sucks. It makes me really angry how old-fashioned and complicated this works. WTF do we need proportional fonts (as in Emacs-21) if the Unicode support is still so poor. /rant Sorry for being rude, but this really makes me mad although I usually am a GNU, FSF and RMS enthusiast. When will it be fixed? VIM6 is supposedly much better now, since it uses the UCS-fonts in an xterm and is fully UTF8-enabled (as Markus Kuhn reported several times on this list). But of course it's not the most attractive sort of sport to learn all the key bindings and other bits and pieces of vi(m) if you used to be happy just with emacs/jed/uemacs. I don't know yet what I will do and what I (as an i18n consultant) will recommend to my friends and customers. Any ideas, comments or prospects on how Emacs+Unicode will evolve?? I should probably join an Emacs-related mailing list and complain/discuss there. just my 200 euros. ;-) oliver - Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
Re: Unicode in Emacs
Oliver Doepner [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: rant Emacs MULE sucks. [...] /rant [...] I should probably join an Emacs-related mailing list and complain/discuss there. Or even better, offer your help to the Emacs development team. IIRC, there is a plan for changing Emacs to be more unicode-oriented, but so far no-one has voulunteered to do the work. You get what you pay for. If free software doesn't work the way you want, you cannot really demand that other people devote their spare time to fix the problem for you. /Lars - Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
Re: Unicode in Emacs
On 25 Oct 2001, Lars Engebretsen wrote: IIRC, there is a plan for changing Emacs to be more unicode-oriented, but so far no-one has voulunteered to do the work. You get what you pay for. If free software doesn't work the way you want, you cannot really demand that other people devote their spare time to fix the problem for you. So far, I have received much more than I paid for: I have paid nothing und just contributed slightly (ideas, bug report) to html-helper-mode.el for GNU Emacs, but did no development in E-Lisp. (I don't know much elisp yet.) I just wanted to express my disappointment about the direction Emacs 21 seems to develop. There is no point in moving towards a word processor if the i18n char-handling is still so screwed. (in my opinion) It should be possible to criticize without being an active emacs hacker. Of course noone is obliged to listen to my pathetic requests (or even do the work to satisfy me and others who are waiting for proper unicode support in emacs). It was probably me being impulsive and emotional. :-| So what? What do other people on this list think about the issue? Is anybody willing to step in and integrate some sort of iconv mechanism into Emacs? Or am I totally on the wrong track and missed something important? My information is: Emacs 20 + Otfried Cheongs extensions for UTF-8 can be installed and configured, then utf8 somehow works for the buffer and operations on that buffer, UCS-fonts can be used in X11 only. In the xterm or console there is no unicode support at all (?). I have heard from many sources that this is still the case with Emacs 21. Or is this information wrong ?! Sorry for just being an emacs USER. :-/ cheers oliver - Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
Re: Unicode in Emacs
On 25 Oct 2001, Lars Engebretsen wrote: I agree with you, but I think that expressions such as sucks and WTF are quite non-constructive in a dialog. They usually cause other people to stop listening. That's perfectly right and I'm sorry for this. So please - anybody who was annoyed by the bad manner: take my regret and reconsider the points i've made / questions i have posed. cheers oliver - Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
Re: Unicode in Emacs
On Thu, 25 Oct 2001, Oliver Doepner wrote: rant Emacs MULE sucks. It makes me really angry how old-fashioned and complicated this works. WTF do we need proportional fonts (as in Emacs-21) if the Unicode support is still so poor. /rant It can't be denied that Emacs lost much of its conceptual elegance and robustness when the MULE work was integrated (though MULE can of course be switched of, which doesn't help you towards UTF-8 support however). When will it be fixed? VIM6 is supposedly much better now, since it uses the UCS-fonts in an xterm and is fully UTF8-enabled (as Markus Kuhn reported several times on this list). But of course it's not the most attractive sort of sport to learn all the key bindings and other bits and pieces of vi(m) if you used to be happy just with emacs/jed/uemacs. You might want to have another look at vim 6. Read the manual and perhaps start to see that it is now *far* more than just a vi clone. It takes less than an hour to find and memorize vim equivalents for all your favourite emacs keystrokes, and it has many features like X11 support and syntax high-lighting that characterized emacs so far well above the other plain and simple text editors (like vi, pico, joe, microemacs). I suggest you give vim 6 a serious try tonight. Perhaps by the time Emacs is finally fully UTF-8 aware, you'll hardly want to use it any more ... Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ - Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
Re: unicode in emacs 21
I haven't meant for anything I've written to indicate that Emacs is not a useful editor for UTF-8 encoded text. I have found it quite usable. I've had a couple of configuration headaches along to way specifically because I am simultaneously maintaining files in both UTF-8 and Latin-3. If the alphabets you use fall within the ranges of characters that Emacs now handles, I can't see any strong argument not to use Emacs. I switched to the prereleases of Emacs 21 a few weeks ago specifically for the Unicode support. For me, there was really no option of choosing anything else, even if I had wanted to. I am doing some heavily customized stuff supported by a pile of Emacs Lisp code tailored to my data over the past 6 1/2 years. Emacs Lisp has saved me hundred of hours. In the end, I would like to see Emacs use Unicode internally. Oliver Doepner wrote: I was happy to see Emacs 21 announced. but the unicode support does not seem to have moved forward very much - as i have heard and read from some people. my question: what happened in this area in Emacs 21 ?? Is the internal representation still the special MULE format ??~ And are there any plans and/or activities to achieve these things ? -- D. Dale Gulledge, Sr. Programmer, [EMAIL PROTECTED] C, C++, Perl, Unix (AIX, Linux), Oracle, Java, Internationalization (i18n), Awk. - Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
Re: unicode in emacs 21
On Thu, 25 Oct 2001, Oliver Doepner wrote: my question: what happened in this area in Emacs 21 ?? What happened is that Emacs now supports Unicode characters that basically span the BMP with the exception of CJK ideographic characters. It also has some initial support for UTF-8. Is the internal representation still the special MULE format ??~ Yes. But the internal representation is not the problem here; ideally, users and Lisp programs shouldn't be worrying about how characters are represented internally. The problem is that characters are still not unified in Emacs 21. So we have two versions of Cyrillic characters, two versions of Greek characters, two versions of Hebrew characters, etc.: one version in the new Unicode set, the other version in the old Mule set. And Emacs thinks these are different characters, so if you mix them without converting them, you are in trouble. And are there any plans and/or activities to achieve these things ? Oh, we have plenty of plans! The problem is with volunteers who would step forward and actually produce some code that implements those plans. It might come as a surprise to some that the decision to change the internal representation of characters to something that is based on Unicode and that unifies the characters--that decision was made several years ago (beginning of 1998, to be exact). At that time, discussions were held which produced a detailed design of the new representation. What remains is for few motivated individuals to sit down and code the darn thing. Which is where we are today, more than 3 years later. Lately, the emacs-unicode mailing list was revived, in the hope that it will boost the activity. Sadly, the traffic on that list is nil. What can I say except ``volunteers are welcome...'' etc.? I can't believe no one wants Unicode badly enough to work on its support in Emacs, but what do I do with facts which fly in my face? - Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
