abbreviations for Unicode

abbreviations for Unicode

[Dale Gerdemann]

I've been editing files with lots of Unicode characters and I thought
I might save time by using abbreviations for certain hard to type
characters (I'm using Mule input methods for the easier stuff).
Everything works okay when I edit the .abbrev_defs file myself, but
the character encoding gets all screwed up when I let Emacs do the
editing. That is, if I use C-x a g to interactively define an
abbreviation, then this will work only for the current session. When I
quit, I'm prompted with the question whether I want to save
the .abbrev_defs file and if I say 'yes', then all the definitions I
have are destroyed.

I'm using GNU Emacs 22.2.1 on Ubuntu 8.10 with LANG=en_US.UTF-8

And btw, I'm mostly very happy with Unicode support in Emacs. My
problem here is really in the category of minor annoyances. But I
would like to fix it.

Re: abbreviations for Unicode

[B. T. Raven]

Dale Gerdemann wrote:
> I've been editing files with lots of Unicode characters and I thought
> I might save time by using abbreviations for certain hard to type
> characters (I'm using Mule input methods for the easier stuff).
> Everything works okay when I edit the .abbrev_defs file myself, but
> the character encoding gets all screwed up when I let Emacs do the
> editing. That is, if I use C-x a g to interactively define an
> abbreviation, then this will work only for the current session. When I
> quit, I'm prompted with the question whether I want to save
> the .abbrev_defs file and if I say 'yes', then all the definitions I
> have are destroyed.
> 
> I'm using GNU Emacs 22.2.1 on Ubuntu 8.10 with LANG=en_US.UTF-8
> 
> And btw, I'm mostly very happy with Unicode support in Emacs. My
> problem here is really in the category of minor annoyances. But I
> would like to fix it.
> 

After you have all the abbrevs set up the way you want them go into the 
*Abbrevs* buffer and run:
C-x ret f utf-8
This should cause ;;-*-coding: emacs-mule;-*- to  be prepended to the 
.abbrev_defs file when you do:
M-x write-abbrev-file

You can call your abbrevs file something else if you want; .abbrev_defs 
is the default or you could have many abbrev files if you needed them 
for some reason.

Ed