Re: Coding systems and Terminal.app on Mac OS X

[Stefan <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> Terminal.app is a complicated application and clearly not finished (with ls
> in Terminal I can't see UTF-8 file names correctly, only
> a??o??u????U??O??A?????,

This seems to be a problem with `ls' rather than with Terminal.app.
Maybe if you try another `ls' binary or another locale it'll work better.

> doing it in Emacs' shell I see
> a\314?o\314?u\314?\303?U\314?O\314?A\314?\342?\254

You mean `ls' inside M-x shell?  If so, I doubt it can work better than `ls'
directly in Terminal.app.  OTOH M-x eshell might handle file names correctly
(as long as it doesn't executed `ls').

> and in dired as the correct string äöüßÜÖÄ€ as in Finder too).

Yes, it's because I've set default-file-name-coding-system to utf-8
on MacOSX, so Emacs should handle MacOSX's filenames correctly.

> Maybe we should try to adjust our settings.

I haven't touched the defaults of Terminal.app.

> I have in Terminal's «Window Preferences»

Where are these?  (I can't get to it right now because my rootfull XDarwin
refuses to obey my cmd-option-A escape to switch back to Quartz, but the
only preferences I remember seeing where really minimal).

>>> TERM_PROGRAM=Apple_Terminal
>>> TERM_PROGRAM_VERSION=100.1.4
>> 
>> Now, the next problem is keyboard input: my meta key doesn't work in
>> Terminal.app

> That is true for GNU Emacs as X11 client, running in xterm,

No.  My meta key works just fine with Emacs running as an X11 client or with
it running in an xterm (you just have to fix your xterm settings, see
`backarrow' in xterm's manpage).

Well, OK, meta doesn't work by default with xterm, because xterm's default
setting makes it basically impossible to handle it right.  (at least with
XDarwin; can't remember how Apple's own X11 distribution behaved).  But once
xterm is fixed, Emacs works correctly.

> I actually don't know what Terminal or Apple or both are trying with this
> and what it's good for (maybe it's necessary for vi/vim), but with the above
> mentioned settings I can directly input with my German keyboard these seven
> umlauts and some more with Character Palette utility and Emacs itself writes
> the month of March as "März" as I set it in calendar-month-name-array and in
> calendar-month-abbrev-array:

Ah... good.  So we can get things to work sensibly.  I'll try it as soon as
XDarwin lets me.


        Stefan