Re: umlauts (8bit characters) input

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Hendrik Sattler <sattler2000@gmx.de> writes:

> lisp/term/linux.el did some more than nothing:
> ;; The Linux console handles Latin-1 by default.
> (unless (terminal-coding-system)
>   (set-terminal-coding-system 'iso-latin-1))
>
> ;; Make Latin-1 input characters work, too.
> ;; Meta will continue to work, because the kernel
> ;; turns that into Escape.
> (let ((value (current-input-mode)))
>   ;; The third arg only matters in that it is not t or nil.
>   (set-input-mode (nth 0 value) (nth 1 value) 'iso-latin-1 (nth 3 value)))
>
> I just copied it over to my ~/.emacs and it works now. So, to correct David,
> emacs does obviously NOT follow locales idea of character set (at least not
> for everything).
> Maybe in my previous installation, I just had TERM fixed to "linux" to solve
> this, I just don't remember...
>
> But you are right: maybe emacs gets to point where it magically
> "just works".

I have just verified that the development version of Emacs will start
up 8-bit transparent if the LC_CTYPE locale is indicating an 8-bit
character set.  So this will work out of the box with Emacs-21.4.

I am afraid that I have not been able to find the manual methods from
term/linux.el in the Emacs-21.3 manual, though I am pretty sure that
at one point of time, the above somewhat arcane way via set-input-mode
was described there.  Maybe the documentation changed faster than the
code.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum