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

[Paul Nathan <pnathan@alumni.uidaho.edu>]

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Hello gentle emacs-devel members,

I am a boring person with a bog standard US keyboard, who uses emacs
extremely regularly, and I would prefer that the character set used be
7-bit ASCII, for the single and solitary reason that I would prefer to type
out characters rather than hunt them down on the Internet or some font
program to copy & paste the character into my emacs. The vast majority of
the programs I write and the files I work with are 7-bit ASCII. This is,
indeed, typical of the organizations I have worked with. Non-ASCII
rendering was confined to .po files and other i18n situations.

It is perhaps unfortunate and certainly an accident of history, but my
keyboard is limited, and is as limited in its expression as my ancient IBM
PS/2 keyboard.

It would satisfy me if I could have a variable *render-in-7-bit* that could
be set to T, and I could continue on my placid and slightly antique way,
with an aesthetic renderer taking over when *render-in-7-bit* is set to NIL.


On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 7:22 AM, Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> wrote:

>
> Hello, Emacs.
>
> First, some definitions.
>
> A @dfn{working character} is a character you use in everyday life - you
> can type it easily on your keyboard for self-insert-command, and it is
> displayed clearly and unambiguously on your screen.  As Emacs developers,
> our working characters are basically ASCII, though each of us has his own
> characters (e.g. ä, ö, ü, ß for me) which count as "private" working
> characters.
>
> By contrast, a @dfn{display character}, or @dfn{non-working character} is
> a character which isn't a working character.  To insert it into a buffer,
> you need to type its numeric code, or use (and remember) a C-x 8 ...
> binding, or some other clumsy workaround.  It might or might not get
> properly displayed on your screen.
>
> Traditionally, Emacs sources have been written exclusively in working
> characters (with the essential exception of some characters which stand
> for themselves, such as some non-ASCII punctuation symbols used in
> `sentence-end').  This makes editing our source files optimally
> efficient.
>
> Recently, there has been a move, primarily by Paul, to introduce
> non-working characters (specifically, LEFT/RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARKs,
> or (less shoutily) "curly quotes") into our sources and *Help* buffers,
> not just marginally, but routinely into all our doc strings and error
> strings.
>
> Paul and I have had an extensive discussion on many of the issues this
> raises, in the thread for bug #20707.  I am against these changes for
> several reasons: basically, they will make our sources more difficult to
> read and edit.  I am not even sure of the motivation for the changes,
> though I think it is mainly that some people find the appearance of 0x60
> and 0x27 as quote marks unaesthetic in some display environments.
>
> My main objection is there is no option to turn this new "feature" off.
> Some users are going to dislike these changes, possible dislike them a
> lot, but we are going to be forcing the curly quotes on them.  This is
> going to create much dissatisfaction.  For comparison, the fringe was a
> new feature in Emacs-21 which had no way of being disabled.  Many users
> hated it, and were up in arms about it until this was fixed in Emacs-22.
>
> 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?
>
> --
> Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
>
>

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