RE: .emacs poser

[Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

> >>> I know about ucs-insert but don't want to have to look
> >>> up the hexcodes.
> >>
> >> You do not have to know the hex code — the canonical character name
> >> will do just fine, and there is tab completion.
>
> Wow!  Who'd'a thunk? I entered in lower case 'combining', tab
> upcased it, and tab again gave a whole page of canonical names
> starting with COMBINING !!
> 
> > And if you have completion with regexp or substring patterns
> > then it becomes even simpler.
> 
> Any regular expression in the mini-buffer returns "Not a unicode
> character..."

I said, "IF you have completion with regexp or substring patterns".

If you use Icicles, for instance, you can match using such patterns.
And you can use progressive completion: match any number of such
patterns, in any order (e.g., multiple substrings).

Actually, you can even match against the character itself.  Why
might you want to do that?  To see the corresponding Unicode
character name(s), including any old names.  For example, for
the character ` you get these two completion candidates:

 GRAVE ACCENT	`
 SPACING GRAVE	`

Completion candidates for this command are multi-completions: the
char name followed by the char itself, separated by a TAB char.

The main purpose for this is to show you the characters along
with their names (WYSIWYG).  The chars are shown in
*Completions* using the same font as the frame from which you
invoked `C-x 8 RET'.  That you can also match against the chars
themselves is just a nice-to-have.

Another part of this feature: When you cycle among the
candidates that match your input, the mode line of *Completions*
shows the char together with its code point (in hex, octal, and
decimal).

The most important parts of this feature, however, are (a)
seeing the characters (WYSIWYG) and (b) being able to use
progressive completion, so you can use multiple simple patterns
instead of a single complex pattern.