Re: Understanding how to specify UTF-8

["B. T. Raven" <btraven@nihilo.net>]

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."

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 -*-


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

Ed