Re: Unicode input on Windows Emacs: any plans?

[Ilya Zakharevich <nospam-abuse@ilyaz.org>]

On 2014-03-25, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>> From: Ilya Zakharevich <nospam-abuse@ilyaz.org>
>> Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 15:40:29 +0000 (UTC)
>> 
>> Is there any plan to have Unicode input enabled on Windows?
>
> That ship sailed a long time ago.  Emacs on Windows supports Unicode
> keyboard input on Windows NT and later since Aug 2012, and Emacs 24.3
> was released with that feature.

Hmm, I was reading the source code of 24.3 instead of running the
binary!  (My workhorse version is 23.2, and since I could not find
changes in the source code, I did not bother upgrading.)  Indeed, the
trivial stuff works fine in 24.3.  Sorry for misrepresentation!

  Now I need to find why I misinterpreted the source code.

> (This is limited to GUI sessions,
> since Unicode support in Windows console applications sucks big time,
> so much so that I consider it a waste of time and effort to support
> that in text mode.)

The only thing which sucks is impossibility to find whether a given
keypress is a part of a character input sequence (a deadkey).  I need
to read the source code more to find out whether this is actually
processed in Emacs.

>>   In addition to 8-bitness, Emacs also suffers from
>>   check-for-specials-first syndrome…

> Not sure what is this about; please elaborate.

The long explanation is in the Web document I quoted
(UI::KeyboardLayout below).  The short one: if I press
SuperDuper-RightArrow on the keyboard (here SuperDuper is a modifier
key), and the keyboard layout defines this combination to deliver a
character, this keypress should NOT be handled to the standard Emacs
keypress interpreter (which would most probably interpret it as just
RightArrow, ignoring the SuperDuper modifier).

  (I would just define a [WithCharacter] event (similar to [menubar])
   [which may “take parameters”], and would attach the keypress and
   the character it delivers as two parameters.  The standard binding
   for WithCharacter event should be to ignore the keypress, while
   inserting the character.  The users would be able to override
   this.)

Example: with izKeys keyboards, press AppMenu-RightArrow.  This should
insert →, but it acts the same as RightArrow.  (The layouts are on
  http://k.ilyaz.org/windows
)

>>   http://search.cpan.org/~ilyaz/UI-KeyboardLayout/lib/UI/KeyboardLayout.pm#Can_an_application_on_Windows_accept_keyboard_events?_Part_I:_insert_only
>> and 3 following parts).

>> P.P.S.  The last time I inspected the source code of Emacs was several
>> 	months ago; I could not post before, so maybe my info is
>> 	obsolete now.
>
> What version did you look in?

24.3 (but as I said, apparently, I misread the code).

Thanks and sorry,
Ilya