Re: Displaying bytes

[David Kastrup]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

>     >     There pretty much shouldn't be any in multibyte buffers.
>
>     > Would it be good to ask people to send bug reports when these
>     > stray byte characters appear in multibyte buffers?
>
>     No, these chars can appear in cases where Emacs does the right thing.
>     I.e. sometimes they reflect bugs, but often they just reflect "pilot
>     errors" or corrupted data completely outside the control of Emacs.
>
> If it is nearly always due to a bug, a user error, or bad data,
> perhaps it would be good to display a diagnostic after file commands
> that put them in the buffer.  Perhaps pop up a buffer explaining what
> these mean and what to do about them.

The encoding indicator in the mode line could get warning-face, and the
respective pop-up help mention

"buffer contains undecodable bytes."

-- 
David Kastrup