Re: On the masking of undisplayable characters

[nljlistbox2@gmail.com (N. Jackson)]

At 09:29 -0300 on Tuesday 2015-07-07, Artur Malabarba wrote:

>> If I have misconfigured something and see straight quotes instead of
>> curly quotes in an X frame, I will notice it right away and start
>> investigating.
>
> Yep, that's what I did too. I'm wondering how long it might take a
> less Emacs-savy user to learn that he can `C-x ='.

FWIW, it took me, your "less Emacs-savy user", about ten years to
discover `C-x ='. (I found M-x describe-char only slightly sooner.)
Before that, if I was suspicious about characters being displayed I'd
open the file in a hex editor. (It took me until today to discover Hexl
Mode in Emacs!)

While I'm here, I may as well say that I'm not happy with Emacs changing
/ misdisplaying characters on me (/ for me) without some sort of visual
indication or message, and it would be nice to have a user option to
tell Emacs not to make such substitutions. An empty box (or one of those
boxes with the number of the codepoint in them) would be fine for me if
none of my available fonts can display the character.