Re: On language-dependent defaults for character-folding

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Wed, 10 Feb 2016 02:18:03 +0000
> From: Artur Malabarba <bruce.connor.am@gmail.com>
> Cc: emacs-devel <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> 
> > > I could be wrong, but I think you just defined all users. In the
> > > Unicode standard used by Emacs, there are 5721 characters with a
> > > “decomposition” property. Is there a user who is well-equiped to type
> > > all of those characters?
> > 
> > (And how many of those 5721 characters can be matched from a latin
> > letter?)
> 
> OK, I see what you meant.

You do?  I don't, because the answer to Óscar's question is: 376 if we
count only canonical decompositions (which we must support, or users
will hate us), and a whopping 1449 if we count compatibility
decompositions as well.  That's quite a few, I'd say, although AFAIR
we don't find all of the compatibility decompositions under character
folding, only some.

Btw, from my POV, the ease of searching for characters not on my
keyboard is not the main point of this feature.  The main feature is
to search for similar characters.  (Of course, I don't mind if someone
likes this for other reasons.)

> Although currently Emacs does fold all decompositions by default, this is just temporary. We've said we would turn that off before release (and in fact I'll do that tomorrow (and ammend my post too)).

We didn't say we will turn it off, we said we will _decide_ whether to
turn it off.  So please don't turn it off just yet, we are still
collecting feedback.  If anything, for now I counted more people who
said they liked it than those who didn't (5 vs 9, by my count).  I'm
not saying we should already decide to leave it on, but turning it off
is certainly premature.  Less than two weeks have passed since the
pretest began, there's no rush.

Thanks.