Re: a few MULE criticisms, cemacs, & current emacs segfaults by changes in GNU ld.

[Kenichi Handa]

In article <address@hidden>, Hin-Tak Leung <address@hidden> writes:
> This is not meant to be a flame - Mr Stallman asked me why I would rather
> continue to use emacs 19.34 (and fixes its problems) in combination
> with an old cemacs elisp script instead of using MULE, and I am writing
> this in the hope that MULE will satisfy my editing needs one day. I
> am native Chinese, and can also do a small amount of Japanese, so
> my experience is probably quite representative.

Thank you for the report.

At first, as far as I know, cemacs.el is a small program
written by <address@hidden> that does just these
things:
  o make emacs 19 use standard-display-8bit
  o rebind forward-char, delete-char, etc to functions that
    pay attention to 8-bit chars.
And, it works only in tty mode under a chinese terminal,
e.g. cxterm.

Correct?  Or, are we talking about the different program?
If so, please send me your version of cemacs.el.

If we are talking about the same program, the current Emacs
doesn't need it.   You can start emacs under cxterm by:
% LANG=zh emasc -nw

Or, start emacs with "-nw" and C-x RET t euc-cn RET C-x RET
k euc-cn RET.

Now, Emacs should display GB2312 characters correctly, and
you can also use the input methods of cxterm.

If you are using cxterm with Big5 mode, do this instead:
% LANG=zh_CN.big5 emacs -nw

> (1) Associations: the ability to let the user choose the next possible
> associated characters.
[...]
> for many years. This would most certainly require extending MULE with
> the ability of loading distionaries of commonly used phrases in
> various languages. And will make the leim package a lot bigger.

I think this should be implemented by extending abbrev-mode
so that it can associate an abbreviation with multiple
words/phrases (is it possible already?)

> (2) Hints: quite similiar to (1), e.g. sometimes I can't quite
> remember the code for "Leung", but vaguely know it is "e*f" in
> ChangJie. (it is actually 'eif'). On just about any other systems
> (MacOS's CJK extensions, etc), the full list is displayed and it
> narrows down as the user types, so the user can select the correct
> one visually if he can't remember the exact code. On Cxterm,
> one can do 'e?f' or 'e??f' to obtain a list of matches.

When you type TAB while you are using an input method, Emacs
shows the full list.  But, the method used in cxterm is not
implemented, it's not easy.

> (3) new input methods, and per-user input methods: adding new input
> mapping methods on a per-user basis and make that the default. I know
> this is possible in MULE - but the procedure is not in the obvious places.
> There are new methods coming out, e.g. new ones developed in view of
> handhelds, which only requires the key-pad numeric keys. And there
> are personal per-user needs e.g. I might like an enhanced ChangJie
> method, which includes a special short-hand for my own name, to
> over-ride the system one.

??? Why is it difficult?   You just have to create a new
leim file, and load it.

> (4) The inability to process part of a file in one encoding and
> save it as a binary stream: This might be possible in MULE, but
> I can't work out how - MULE seems to insist that I save or
> convert documents into its internal representation. e.g. I have a file,
> part of which is in GB2312, part in JIS-euc, and part BIG5, separated
> by clear ASCII markers. I would like to edit the different parts
> individually, and without breaking the others, and without converting
> to MULE's internal format or a common one like UTF-8. I don't think
> it is difficult to implement, but it is more like the MULE developers
> think they know my needs better than I do, and insist that I do
> things their way.

There are two ways for dealing with such a situation.
  o use file-name-handler
  o make a special coding system
The attached is a quick hack for the latter.  When you load
mixed-coding.el, you can read the file sample.txt by C-x RET
c mixed-coding RET C-x C-x sample.txt RET, and save that
file simply by C-x C-s.  Separator lines are highlighted in
a buffer.

---
Ken'ichi HANDA
address@hidden

mixed-coding.tar.gz
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