Re: Upcoming loss of usability of Emacs source files and Emacs.

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2015 14:22:37 +0000
> From: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>
> 
> My view is that the curly quotes should not replace 0x60 and 0x27 in our
> sources, but that the option to display them as curly quotes should be
> made available to those that want it.
> 
> As far as I am aware, there has been no poll to gather and analyse the
> views of Emacs developers on these changes, much less one for Emacs
> users.  This is a Bad Thing.
> 
> What do people think?

I think this ship has sailed long ago.  E.g., GCC has been spewing
UTF-8 encoded quotes at me for several years now, and many Info
manuals started using Unicode characters, that show as gibberish on my
text terminal, many moons ago.

Like you, I don't like these characters very much.  The make my life
slightly harder.  But I like fighting quixotic wars even less.
Instead of fighting this wave, we should adapt and move on.

And there are ways of adapting: convenient input methods for typing
the characters, replacements for displaying them on terminals that
cannot show the originals, run Grep from within Emacs if it's
inconvenient to type these characters from a terminal and observe the
results there, etc.  We already have all that, and perhaps will need
some more, which we will discover as we move on.  The next release of
Texinfo, just around the corner, will have a feature where the Info
reader will display these characters in a legible form, even if the
terminal is not UTF-8 capable.  So it's not a catastrophe, just
something new to adapt to, and make sure, like we already do, that the
degradation on less capable devices is graceful.