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

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Chad.

On Sun, Jun 28, 2015 at 12:54:17PM -0700, chad wrote:

> > On 28 Jun 2015, at 12:27, Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden> wrote:

> >> For example, I've seen uses of ⸢foo⸥ for marking up source code
> >> snippets.  That seems pretty unambiguous (although you can never be
> >> sure), ....

> > Whatever those quoting characters might be, they display on my terminal
> > as inverted question marks.  I haven't a clue what they might be, and it
> > would be a lot of work to find out.

> Curious: does `C-u C-x =' not work for some reason? 

Yes.  It doesn't work because I wasn't in Emacs.  I was in vim inside
mutt, composing an email.  I might have been looking at the source file
in less, or searching it with grep, or even manipulating it with sed or
awk.

Anytime you want to do something with such a file with such characters
is a pain.  Even inside Emacs, having to type  C-u C-x = just to find
out what a character is is a pain.

> It works fine for me even in a glass TTY, but I wasn't actually able
> to find a nearby TTY that didn't display them properly with only 
> several minutes effort.

Yes.  But that's only after knowing what it is you have to do.  A
typical Emacs user is going to have to start reading man pages, or
searching the web, or posting on help-gnu-emacs.  I'm not even convinced
a typical user knows about C-x =.

> ~Chad

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).