Re: Typing and pasting "special" characters directly in emacs in xterm?

[Pascal Bourguignon <pjb@informatimago.com>]

Adam Funk <a24061@yahoo.com> writes:

> When I'm running emacs as an X application (i.e. in it's own GUI
> window) I have no problem typing £ and composed non-US characters (I
> have a UK keyboard and the compose:rwin X option) and using X to copy
> text including funny quotation marks (for example) and paste it into
> emacs.
>
> But when I run emacs -nw in xterm or over ssh in an xterm, it tends to
> blow up when I do these things: the desired characters don't appear,
> the point moves around and sometimes bits of text get deleted.
>
> (I've tried googling for this but I apparently don't know the right
> words to describe this problem.)
>
> Any suggestions?

Since Meta is not an ASCII code, there are two ways to send Meta thru
a terminal.  

The first way is to use escape ESC, to signify that the following
character is to be combined with Meta.  

M-d  is transmited as the bytes 27 100  (for ASCII ESC and  ASCII d).


The second way is to assume a 7-bit ASCII keyboard, and to use the 8th
bit to indicate when Meta is pressed.  

M-d is then transmited as the byte 228  (100 + 8th bit set).


Unfortunately, if you have an ISO-8859-1 or ISO-8859-15 keyboard, the
byte 228 is the ISO-8859-1/15 character ä.

So when you type ä, you send 228, and emacs interprets that as M-d,
which will delete the following word.



So, you should configure your terminal to send ESC for Meta instead of
setting the high bit.  Then you can use the high bit to send
ISO-8859-15 character codes instead of ASCII+Meta.

You can do that editing ~/.Xresources or with Control-<MouseLeftDown>
in the xterm window to display a menu and select "Meta Sends Escape".

Mind setting the various LC_* environment variables to indicate the
encoding you use.

You can also use a UTF-8 aware terminal, to be able to display and
enter characters out of the ISO-8859-15 character set.

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

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