Re: Mode_switch in Emacs

[Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>]

>> I see no reason to activate both XIM russian layout and LEIM russian
>> input method in Emacs.
>
> I hope we indeed all agree on this one ;-)
>
> Tho now that you mention it, I'm wondering: how do people deal with the
> situation where their keyboard is cyrillic and they want to use one of
> Emacs's input methods (which are all based on latin chars)?

All Cyrillic keyboards have Latin chars too, i.e. each of the most
physical keys has two labels: one for a Latin character, and one
for a Cyrillic character.  So after switching XIM to a Latin layout
(not necessarily English, any Latin-based language layout will work)
it is possible to use Emacs's input methods on Cyrillic keyboards.

>> Somewhere С-ц may be preferable to C-w, but at least in Emacs I think
>> interpreting С-ц as C-w is more natural.  However, this is still not
>> very useful in Emacs because it will enable only key sequences with
>> control/meta modifiers, but not with raw letters.  I.e. what good is
>> to process С-ц as C-w, if `C-x b' will produce useless `C-x и'?
>
> That's a very good point indeed.  It basically means we should
> postpone the decision whether to translate b into и to much later.

This would be nice.  Ideally, all keys should be translated except
self-inserting keys.  I.e. this translation should be opposite to
LEIM input methods: LEIM input methods translate self-inserting
ASCII characters to the target language, but with an active non-Latin
XIM layout, Emacs should translate non-ASCII components of non-self-inserting
key combinations to their ASCII equivalents.

> Now how does all the above look in the case of XIM input methods that map
> multi-key sequences to chars (typically for asian scripts)?

I guess this may not work with other XIM input methods.  So instead of
blindly converting non-ASCII characters to ASCII for all XIM input methods,
perhaps Emacs should use a new variable with "non-ASCII to ASCII" mappings.

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/