From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: Insert Euro symbol Date: 04 May 2002 15:06:58 +0900 Organization: The XEmacs Project Sender: emacs-devel-admin@gnu.org Message-ID: <87helojvjx.fsf@tleepslib.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> References: <87elgue23x.fsf@tc-1-100.kawasaki.gol.ne.jp> <8296-Fri03May2002092555+0300-eliz@is.elta.co.il> <87g019a4mz.fsf@tc-1-100.kawasaki.gol.ne.jp> NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: main.gmane.org 1020492553 27506 127.0.0.1 (4 May 2002 06:09:13 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 4 May 2002 06:09:13 +0000 (UTC) Cc: Eli Zaretskii , emacs-devel@gnu.org Return-path: Original-Received: from quimby.gnus.org ([80.91.224.244]) by main.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 3.33 #1 (Debian)) id 173sjJ-00079W-00 for ; Sat, 04 May 2002 08:09:13 +0200 Original-Received: from fencepost.gnu.org ([199.232.76.164]) by quimby.gnus.org with esmtp (Exim 3.12 #1 (Debian)) id 173spM-0007L2-00 for ; Sat, 04 May 2002 08:15:28 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=fencepost.gnu.org) by fencepost.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 3.34 #1 (Debian)) id 173sjA-0005ds-00; Sat, 04 May 2002 02:09:04 -0400 Original-Received: from tleepslib.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp ([130.158.98.109]) by fencepost.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 3.34 #1 (Debian)) id 173shu-0005bC-00 for ; Sat, 04 May 2002 02:07:47 -0400 Original-Received: from steve by tleepslib.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp with local (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 173sh9-0007kj-00; Sat, 04 May 2002 15:06:59 +0900 Original-To: Miles Bader In-Reply-To: <87g019a4mz.fsf@tc-1-100.kawasaki.gol.ne.jp> Original-Lines: 68 User-Agent: Gnus/5.0808 (Gnus v5.8.8) XEmacs/21.4 (Common Lisp) X-Delivery-Agent: TMDA/0.51 (Python 2.1.3 on Linux/i686) Errors-To: emacs-devel-admin@gnu.org X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.0.9 Precedence: bulk List-Help: List-Post: List-Subscribe: , List-Id: Emacs development discussions. List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:3569 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel:3569 >>>>> "Miles" == Miles Bader writes: Miles> "Eli Zaretskii" writes: >> > It's very convenient for people who don't use a latin-x input >> > method normally but want to only insert a character or two. >> >> Is that because you have some other input method active? Miles> Yes. I normally use the japanese language environment, etc. FWIW I agree with Miles 100%. LEIM is broken by design in the same way that XIM is broken, that is, it assumes that input methods are modal. IMO, input methods should not be modal, they should be context- sensitive.[1] Ie, if your LANG=ja_JP.eucJP and you visit a file which is known to be in Polish (Latin-2), you should be able to start typing and get a Latin-2 input method. More, if you're a Buddhist scholar with a trilingual (Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese) document and you overstrike a Japanese character, you should be in a Japanese input method no matter what your most recent previous insertion used. If for some reason you really want to overstrike with Sanskrit, then you explicitly invoke an input method, through a mechanism like C-x 8. This would be really hard to implement, of course (without telepathy.el which I hear is still totally non-functional :-). Since most people and most documents are monolingual, a modal input framework is a close approximation to the context-sensitive framework (in number-of-keystroke terms, not in annoyance terms, YMMV). But C-x 8 is a really important facility for making this bearable to multilingual users. Note that most fullfledged Japanese input methods provide both modal aspects (is the basic input romanized phonetics or Japanese phonetics?) but also C-x 8-like "single shifts" to menus of symbols, radical/stroke count input, direct input of JIS codes, and even more exotic methods. These are only used for "rare" characters that may not be in the IM's dictionary or that the user can't pronounce. By analogy, I would suggest that C-x 8 could be considered a single-shift to a designated secondary input method. The default should be "traditional C-x 8", but it should be reconfigurable to a "single shift" to any LEIM IM. (This probably requires extensions to LEIM.) C-x 9 could give a menu of available input methods (ordered by user preference), then you enter one char using that IM. C-u versions of C-x 8 and C-x 9 could allow changing the defaults (C-u C-x 9 therefore probably should invoke a Customize method). This is quite complex, but the typical monolingual "The sysadmin set LANG in /etc/profile and I've never noticed" user still won't notice. Nor will Latin-2 users who need to enter the Euro sign (once U+20AC gets added to C-x 8 :-). Buddhist scholars and other polyglots will get a lot of benefit from it, I think, although they really want a 'input-method text property. Footnotes: [1] I don't know of any context-sensitive implementations, except in edict.el, and that's broken at the moment. AFAIK Emacs is the only app with any hope of getting it right, anyway. -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN My nostalgia for Icon makes me forget about any of the bad things. I don't have much nostalgia for Perl, so its faults I remember. Scott Gilbert c.l.py