Re: Is it possible to use new Emacsen with non-ASCII?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Ilya Zakharevich <nospam-abuse@ilyaz.org>
> Date: Thu, 15 May 2008 18:10:12 +0000 (UTC)
> Bcc: ilya@gnu.org
> Originator: ilya@powdermilk.math.berkeley.edu
> 
> P.S.  Let me remind what is an 8-bit-safe program: I come to a TTY.
>       The keyboard allows me to enter some characters (encoded as
>       8-bit).  The screen is able to show glyphs for these characters.
> 
>       Given this, I can use
> 
> 	    cat >> file
> 
>       to "edit" a file.  Note that I do not care in any way what is
>       the encoding of these chars...  Emacs should be at least as
>       "smart" as cat.
> 
>       How should one convince Emacs to be as smart as cat, and why
>       this is not documented?

You need to decide whether you want Emacs or cat.  Emacs is not cat,
and cannot be convinced to work like cat.  Trying that will only
complicate your life more than you'd like, and won't give you what you
want.  In fact, using --unibyte you already complicate your life more
than necessary.

Let Emacs work like it was designed to: decode characters when you
visit a file and encode them back when it displays them on the screen.
Try it, it really works.