Re: terminal

[Pascal Bourguignon <usenet@informatimago.com>]

"gaetanoortisi@yahoo.it" <gaetanoortisi@yahoo.it> writes:
> I have emacs on slackware 10.2 and I need support for iso 8859 1 chars
> like accented e.
> On xterm these characters appear normally, but in emacs when I type
> accented e is like
> I type C-p. I check the FAQ, and try the set-terminal-coding-system and
> set-language-environment
> commands, but it seems not work. What I have to do?

emacs use the meta key intensively.  
There is no ASCII code corresponding to this key.

So there are two way to send a meta key to emacs, from a terminal:
1- send ESC followed by the meta-chord characters.  
2- send the meta-chord characters with the high bit set.

This should be configurable in your terminal emulator.

Accented characters in ISO-8859-1 have this high bit set, so emacs
takes them as meta chords.


In emacs, meta-prefix-char specifies the character used for meta (ESC
by default, but it could be another).  You probably want to leave it
as it is.


What you need to set in emacs, to match your iso-8859-1 terminal, is
the keyboard-coding-system.  Put this in your ~/.emacs:

(when (null window-system) (setq keyboard-coding-system 'iso-8859-1))

and set your terminal to send ESC for meta.

-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/

There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not
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