bug#20707: [PROPOSED PATCH] Use curved quoting in C-generated errors

[Paul Eggert]

On 06/01/2015 10:17 AM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> how do you type that left curly quote.

In the new Electric Quote minor mode you can type just ` for the typical 
case.  Outside Electric Quote, you can type C-x 8 ` (or A-` if your Alt 
key is working).  Except for A-` this all should work on any keyboard.  
You don't need to memorize a 4 digit hex value (I can never remember it 
myself).

>  However, searching for the ASCII back tick (correctly) fails to find 
> it. This is disconcerting.

It may be disconcerting at first, but it's easy to get used to and it 
has advantages, e.g., it provides finer-grained control over searching.  
Where I want to find a left single quote of either style, I can do a 
regexp search for "[`‘]" but in interactive usage this is rare, at least 
for me.

> I use the Linux virtual terminal: $TERM = linux consolefont="lat1-16" 
> It doesn't handle UTF-8, because I never put in the effort to make it 
> do so.

According to <https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/UTF-8#The_system_console> it 
should work if you have sys-apps/baselayout 
<http://packages.gentoo.org/package/sys-apps/baselayout> 1.11.9 or 
higher installed, have unicode="yes" in /etc/rc.conf, and specify e.g. 
keymap="uk" in /etc/conf.d/keymaps.  The console font lat9w-16 seems to 
be reasonably popular, so you might try that. UTF-8 works out of the box 
in Ubuntu and Fedora on the system console; I don't use Gentoo but it 
shouldn't be a lot of trouble to get it to work there too.