emacs-devel
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: On language-dependent defaults for character-folding


From: Óscar Fuentes
Subject: Re: On language-dependent defaults for character-folding
Date: Tue, 09 Feb 2016 19:21:24 +0100
User-agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/25.0.50 (gnu/linux)

Artur Malabarba <address@hidden> writes:

[snip]

> == Bottomline ==
> I don't know if it's possible to figure out the language of the user's
> keyboard layout. But the point is that we should care about the
> language that the user can _type_ in,

Figuring out this (and acting upon that knowledge) looks like a quite
complex task to me. In practice, letting the user tell Emacs about how
the char folding should happen is more reasonable.

> NOT the language that they
> happen to be _reading_ now nor the language that they happen to
> _know_.

What I get from all this saga it that character folding is about
allowing users to search for weird characters used by those
funny-looking aliens who are harrassed by the guards when they pretend
to cross our borders :-) You don't care about what the character really
is, you just notice that it is "that character I know with some
decoration added" and then use the character you know for searching for
the funny one.

I hope you all realize that the users who can benefit from this feature
are those who are ill-equiped to *search* for certain characters,
related to the latin alphabet, and need to that only occasionally. OTOH
we have the people who actually write those characters, hence they don't
need help for searching for them, and who will be pissed to discover
that Isearch is broken.

We don't need a smarter feature, we need a sane default, which is
"disabled". When activated, act as Unicode says, which seems to be
clearly defined. That's it.

Much of the confussion on this topic originated on the expectation that
the feature could be used for searching for equivalent characters within
a language (*), but as that is not what is about, the need for
language-dependent customizations vanishes, and with it the complexity
goes away too.

* Some languages (French) may benefit from the feature anyways, because
  the "equivalence classes" of theirs happen to coincide with what the
  character folding feature does.




reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]