
	Accented characters in emacs



	This Entry: Date: 2007-02-12 Time: 16:08 Comments: 1 Return To: Recent Entries



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Accented characters in emacs

Emacs is a pretty good editor. Recently I’ve been hosting a traditional music show and I find myself needing to type accents for Irish and Scottish. This is of course in addition to the french accents I’ve been needing for years.

I use the Mac OS X Terminal application and the system lets me enter accents using dead keys. I hold option and press e to set up an acute accent, then press e again and get é.

This worked in the shell, but did not work in emacs. Now, emacs has lots of different ways to do its own keyboard entry, but I wanted my mac keys to work.

To complicate matters, I use emacs on at least one machine running FreeBSD 4 which does not support UTF-8 encodings (the mac default).

I have had success with the following combination:

Emacs 21.4 (version 20 does not work)
locale set to en_CA.ISO8859-1
Escape non-ASCII characters off (Terminal window setting)
Character Set Encoding: Western ISO Latin 1 (Terminal window setting)
Use option key as meta key off (Terminal window setting)
(set-terminal-coding-system 'iso-latin-1) in ~/.emacs
(set-keyboard-coding-system 'iso-latin-1) in ~/.emacs

Now I can type and paste accented text into the terminal application and thence into emacs. The accents come through OK and seem to save and email OK too!

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› technology 2007-02-12 16:08 ...1


	Helped at least one! The link comes on the first page google search for 'emacs accents', and the '(set-terminal-coding-system 'iso-latin-1)' plus '(set-keyboard-coding-system 'iso-latin-1) ' work well on Linux - thanks, George. at 2007-4-7 12:39 by G. Georgiev

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