Re: GNU Emacs 21.2.1 kill-line bug ?

[Kevin Rodgers]

Besam Khidhir wrote:
> So, running Emacs 21.2.1 on Mac OS X 10.3.4, base emacs install, I'm
> in a buffer with some binary characters, I do a kill-line (C-k) and
> then switch to another buffer and yank, and guess what, my characters
> come out different... it looks like some characters such as \366 get
> replaced with '?'.
>
> When I do a save I get prompted for what encoding I want to
> use... which doesn't change anything because vi sees the characters as
> '?'.
...
> Any ideas?

C-h v buffer-file-coding-system [in both buffers]
C-h v selection-coding-system

See the "Coding Systems" node of the Emacs manual, and the preceding
nodes under "International [Character Set Support]".

`C-h n' will show you all the user-visible changes since the venerable
Emacs 19.34 (released almost 8 years ago!).

> If this is a "feature" is there anyway to turn it off: ie. get emacs
> back to the good old days when a character was a character and there
> wasn't any "hiding" of characters (noticed how ^M characters don't
> appear any more when you edit DOS files) or "replacing" of characters
> with '?'.

The "Enabling Multibyte Characters" node of the Emacs manual explains:

|    To turn off multibyte character support by default, start Emacs with
| the `--unibyte' option (*note Initial Options::), or set the
| environment variable `EMACS_UNIBYTE'.  You can also customize
| `enable-multibyte-characters' or, equivalently, directly set the
| variable `default-enable-multibyte-characters' to `nil' in your init
| file to have basically the same effect as `--unibyte'.

> I mean I used to rely on emacs to show me everything but these days I
> trust vi more than emacs and that's saying something...

You are confused.  Trust the One True Editor, and deliver yourself from
eVIl.

--
Kevin Rodgers