Re: Understanding how to specify UTF-8

[Will Parsons <wbp@nodomain.invalid>]

B. T. Raven wrote:
> Hi Will. I decided to respond because of this observation in the latest 
> posting:
> "They used to say emacs and vi are religions; these days they are 
> starting to seem like latin."

Not completely - "Emacs" should be spelt "Emax" first ;)
(And the plural, I suppose should be "emaces" rather than "emacsen".)

> On 4/7/2017 18:43, Will Parsons wrote:
>> I want to always use Unicode/UTF-8 unless otherwise specified.  I've noticed
>> that I've attempted to do this in my .emacs file in two separate ways on two
>> separate platforms:
>>
>> 1)  (setq-default buffer-file-coding-system 'utf-8-unix)
>>
>> 2)  (set-language-environment "UTF-8")
>>
>> Both seem to work, but I'm wondering if there are subtle differences between
>> the two that I should be aware of.
>
> I can't help with any subtlties but can only recommend that you add this 
> cookie to the beginning of the buffer:
>
>   ;; -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

Yes, I've employed that too.  (Incidentally, I've been programming a lot in
Ruby for some years now, and I was surprised to find that after inserting a
copyright symbol (©) into one of my Ruby source files, that Emacs ruby-mode
inserted a line containing '# coding: utf-8' at the top when the file was
saved.)

> I think it may be enough to save and reload the file into a new buffer 
> before adding exotic characters.
> I also have these lines in my .emacs:
>
>    (set-locale-environment   "utf-8")
>          (set-language-environment               'utf-8)
>          (set-default-coding-systems             'utf-8)
>          (setq file-name-coding-system           'utf-8)
>          (setq buffer-file-coding-system 'utf-8)
>          (setq coding-system-for-write           'utf-8)
>          (set-keyboard-coding-system             'utf-8)
>          (set-terminal-coding-system          'utf-8)
>          (prefer-coding-system                   'utf-8)
>          ;; (set-buffer-process-coding-system 'utf-8 'utf-8)
>          (modify-coding-system-alist 'process 
> "[cC][mM][dD][pP][rR][oO][xX][yY]" 'utf-8-dos)
>
> The line commented out caused a problem but I don't remember what it 
> was. My os w64 vers. 7

Wow.  I should think that should cover all possibilities.  I prefer to be a
bit more minimalist than that though...

Anyway, thanks - Vale Edwarde!

-- 
Will