Mail Archives: djgpp/2002/02/09/06:30:04.1
from Eli Zaretskii:
>Then "C-x RET c latin-1 RET C-x C-f file-name RET" should have worked.
>It does for me (I read all my email in Emacs, and it comes in many
>different languages, all of them displayed, saved, printed, and sent
>correctly).
I had that first part as "C-x RET t latin-1 RET" with t instead of c. I guess
I should do that immediately before opening any file. Do you read all your
email in DOS Emacs, or is it a Unix-related or other OS? I looked in your
message headers and saw
X-Mailer: emacs 21.2.50 (via feedmail 8 I) and Blat ver 1.8.9
I thought the newest DOS version available for download was 20.5, but that was
some time last December. Or you could be testing a new version before releasing
it.
>Alternatively, if you don't care about any language but German, invoke
>Emacs with the --unibyte switch. This will leave the 8-bit characters
>intact, but they probably won't be displayed correctly (since the DOS
>terminal cannot display Latin-1 characters encoded in 8859-1).
You mean I'd get what I'm so accustomed to, the DOS implementation of the 8-bit
characters, like lower-case Greek theta (ASCII 233) for e-acute-accent, and
a divide sign for lower-case o-umlaut? That would be better than showing and
then saving as ASCII 127, and might be the best I can do with DOS, or OS/2 for
that matter. Now I'm curious to try that as an experiment, just to see how it
works (not now as I type this, DOS is single-tasking).
>terminal-coding-system has nothing to do with how the file is read and
>written. It only matters for how text is _displayed_. And you should
>never set it to latin-1, since the DOS terminal can only display one
>character set--the one defined by the currently installed codepage.
I guess I should not set-terminal-coding-system in DOS? Maybe that was intended
for Unix.
>In addition, with Emacs, you can mix several different languages,
>like German, Polish, and Russian, in the same buffer, and have them
>all displayed correctly. (In the DJGPP version, unless you have
>Cyrillic characters built into your video ROM, the Russian part will
>look a bit awkward, but it still can be read by someone who speaks
>the language.)
>You can also type text in any language you want, even ones whose
>characters cannot be produced by your keyboard.
>What other DOS editor can do that? Can you type Russian with Vim?
Except for Russian, these languages use the Roman alphabet, and some Cyrillic
characters and some Greek characters have identical appearance to letters in the
Roman alphabet. So you could mix some languages together in the same buffer, as
long as they use the same alphabet, though rendering might not necessarily be
100% perfect. Do you type different languages with different alphabets in the
same buffer with DOS Emacs?
I don't expect to read the Korean and Chinese spams I receive in DOS Emacs or
any other DOS text editor. Since I can't read Chinese and Korean anyway, DOS
codepage 437 or 850 is as good as any, and I'm surely not going out of my way to
read spam.
I once saw Roman and Cyrillic characters on a text-mode screen in Linux when it
wasn't supposed to happen, when I tried to view the directory of a CD-ROM in a
different virtual terminal after running xf86config. But I think X-Windows is
much better for viewing different character sets together. I think Emacs would
do better in X-Windows than in text mode, but there is no XFree86 port for DOS,
and I don't know if such would be feasible.
>> Apparently a lot of people prefer vi and relatives over Emacs.
>A much larger number have opposite preferences. Try reading
>gnu.emacs.help or comp.emacs some day.
Reading in Linux Journal November 2001, results of the Readers' Choice survey,
with over 6500 readers voting, for favorite text editor:
1. vim
2. vi (and clones)
3. GNU Emacs
This was for Linux. When I started using vim 6 for DOS, I figured I was one of
a very few, figured about the same with DOS Emacs.
Thanks for the help. Anything I may have said critical about Emacs, DOS version
or otherwise, was not intended to be taken personally as an insult.
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