terminal

terminal

[gaetanoortisi]

Hello, this is my problem:

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?
Thanks,

     tano

Re: terminal

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 26.03.2006 um 13:42 schrieb gaetanoortisi@yahoo.it:

> 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?

With a modern version of GNU Emacs (21.3, 21.4) it should be  
sufficient to set environment variables like LC_CTYPE to something  
like it_IT.ISO8859-15 (I presume that you pay in €, too). This should  
make most things work, except some characters/glyphs, which might  
make it necessary to create fontsets (C-h H can give hints). A final

	(prefer-coding-system 'iso-8859-15)

should make it clear. If you work in different ISO Latin environments

	(unify-8859-on-decoding-mode t)
	(unify-8859-on-encoding-mode t)

might be useful.


BTW, is your GNU Emacs running inside xterm or as an X client?

--
Greetings

   Pete

Bake Pizza not war!

Re: terminal

[Pascal Bourguignon]

"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
want merely because you think it would be good for him. -- Robert Heinlein

Re: terminal

[gaetanoortisi]

I do, and it does not work.
I try to use M-x keyboard-coding-system command on minibuffer,
switching to iso-latin-1 or iso-8859-1 charset. It works for accented
chars but now alt is not recognized as meta key (it prints a strange
symbol, like a diameter). (What I have to underline is that also before
this trick the accented chars is printed if they are in an opened file,
but I can't *input* them.)
How can I use fix the meta key?

 tano

Re: terminal

[Stefan Monnier]

> I try to use M-x keyboard-coding-system command on minibuffer, switching
> to iso-latin-1 or iso-8859-1 charset.  It works for accented chars but now
> alt is not recognized as meta key (it prints a strange symbol, like
> a diameter).

IIUC the problem is that you're using a terminal that's badly configured, so
it uses the 8th bit of data both for accented chars and for the meta-bit.
So M-i sends the exact same code (i.e. 233, aka E9) as é, so clearly Emacs
can't tell which was meant.

You have to change your terminal's settings so that it sends the meta bit
differently (typically by turning it into an ESC char such that M-i doesn't
send a single 233 byte but two bytes (27 and 105, corresponding to ESC and
i).  While you're at it, please repot this problem to whoever configured
your terminal (e.g. your distribution, or the original author).


        Stefan