emacs misbehaves without --unibyte

[Paul Stoeber]

Miles Bader miles@gnu.org on Tue, 28 May 2002 16:49:04 GMT:
> It should work fine if you've set the languange environment correctly
> (so it knows what the non-ASCII characters are), e.g. by using
> `set-language-environment', or having an appropriate setting of LANG.

That means, my LANG=C is inappropriate for emacs.

I don't care about l10n/i18n (that's what LANG=C should convey to programs),
and I want to steer through alien filesystems and text/binary files gracefully
(e.g. using octal escapes).

In its default usage, emacs doesn't meet this requirement---it doesn't have
the robust 8-bit cleanness of bash, nvi, perl and most other unix tools.

But I guess that's okay, it's just different from the tools I'm used to, and
it was very irritating until I found one possible fix (--unibyte).

Neither (setq set-language-environment "Latin-1") nor
(setq file-name-coding-system 'latin-1) creates an 8-bit clean
environment.  Trying to open the file $'gr\200\340ve' in dired opens
$'gr\236\240\201\340ve' instead.