Re: non-breaking spaces in view-mode

[Roland Winkler]

On Wed Jan 26 2005 Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > about these things. However, I have a little file that contains this
> > character `\240'. When I visit this file, the character is displayed
> > differently depending on whether emacs is in unibyte mode or
> > multibyte mode.)
> 
> That the result is different is not necessarily a surprise.
> Unibyte mode is for people who think "a char is a byte is a char".
> Hopefully those people are on their way to extinction, or at least
> insignificance.

I am using unibyte mode because I am doing my email with vm.

About a year ago I unintentionally changed my setup so that emacs
used multibyte mode instead of unibyte mode. I was rather surprised
that suddenly vm produced many strange results -- till I figured out
that it was the multibyte mode. So I switched back to unibyte mode.
I haven't had any problems with vm since then.

> > - If EMACS_UNIBYTE is set, "emacs --no-init-file --no-site-file"
> >   displays non-breaking space as `\240'.
> 
> What did it do in Emacs-21.3?

No matter whether it is unibyte mode or multibyte mode (or `emacs -nw'),
Emacs-21.3 displays `\240' as a white space, which is what I expect to see.

> >   character: Â  (0240, 160, 0xa0)
> 
> Did you actually see this 2-char sequence "Â " in the buffer or
> is it some problem with your mail?

This seems to be a mail problem. I have never seen such a 2-char
sequence when visiting a  file which contains non-breaking spaces.

Actually, while we are talking about it:

Recently I was annoyed that copying from some other X application
into emacs produced such strange 2-char sequences. Right now, I do
not have a simple recipe for such an example that could be
reproduced. When it happens again I'll check whether it depends on
unibyte or multibyte mode.

> Any reason why you keep using the unibyte mode? (seems like
> masochism to me, at this point in the evolution of Emacs).

I am just curious here: Is unibyte mode not supported anymore?
Well, when one uses packages like vm one needs the backward
compatibilty (though I know it makes maintanance of emacs much more
difficult).

Roland