Re: non-breaking spaces in view-mode

[Stefan Monnier]

> I've been using VM for more than ten years. Kyle, the author of VM,
> used to improve it continously. Unfortunately, for about a year
> there has been hardly any update. 

> VM-7.19 was released 29 September 2004, which Kyle announced with
> the words "I'm back from the dead." However, this release contained
> mostly bugfixes. Since then, Kyle has disappeared once again from
> the VM news groups. I find this very unfortunate, but it will make
> it more difficult to get better multibyte support from VM.

Isn't there anybody else providing occasional patches to VM?

When a multibyte-error occurs in an easy to reproduce way, it's generally
not that hard to fix it (as long as you understand the difference between
bytes and chars, that is).

> - In multibyte mode, emacs displays non-breaking spaces with a
>   colored backslash and a space.
> - In unibyte mode, emacs displays non-breaking space as `\240'.
> - Always, "emacs -nw" displays non-breaking space just as a space,
>   no matter whether it is unibyte mode or multibyte mode.

I've committed a patch which should fix both of the above bug.

>> It is still supported, but we're discouraging its use. It was
>> useful back when most packages hadn't been adapted to Mule, but
>> nowadays there is rarely any reason to use unibyte mode and so
>> we're making less effort to try and make sure that unibyte mode
>> works "as best it can" (it often uses guesses and so necessarily
>> breaks down in some cases).

> Maybe the info node "Enabling Multibyte" of the emacs manuel could
> state more explicitly that the use of unibyte mode is discouraged.

I can't remember whether we had agreed that we discouraged it enough to
actually write it down.  Richard?


        Stefan