Re: File name completion on Mac OS X with German umlauts

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 10.03.2008 um 22:25 schrieb Markus:

> Err, my mode-line looks like this: 1:-- rückerstattung.txt
>
> When hovering the 1, the tool tip says: iso-latin-1-unix buffer
>
> But this tells you about the encoding of the file content, not its  
> name, I guess!

Not really! GNU Emacs reads the contents of the file in cold blood.  
Then, according to the encoding set or chosen, it *presents* this  
pile of bytes as a bunch of glyphs taken from the font used. The  
encoding maps one or more bytes to a single character. Each such  
character has its distinct character code. According to this the  
glyph is chosen from the font and displayed.

The encoding of the file contents can be "encoded" (better: recorded  
or saved) in a local variable inside the file ... as an option.

A byte \327 (octal, 215 dec, D7 hex) represents in most ISO 8859  
encodings (1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 13, 15) the MULTIPLICATION SIGN at U+00D7  
(in UTF-8 it's encoded as the two bytes C3 97). The same byte is

  in ISO 8859-5  the CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER ZE              at U+0437  
(D0 B7 in UTF-8),
  in ISO 8859-6  the ARABIC LETTER TAH                     at U+0637  
(D8 B7 in UTF-8),
  in ISO 8859-7  the GREEK CAPITAL LETTER CHI              at U+03A7  
(CE A7 in UTF-8),
  in ISO 8859-11 the THAI CHARACTER SARA UEE               at U+0E37  
(E0 B8 B7 in UTF-8),
  in ISO 8859-14 the LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T WITH DOT ABOVE at U+1E6A  
(E1 B9 AA in UTF-8),
  in ISO 8859-16 the LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S WITH ACUTE     at U+015A  
(C5 9A in UTF-8).

(Continue with Mac, NeXT, MS, ... encodings!)

Usually Emacs learns from the shell which encoding is used, or might  
be preferred. In Mac OS X (as on the NeXT) a different mechanism to  
launch or create a process is used, without shell interaction. So  
Cocoa or Carbon applications (Aqua clients?) come up as babies, as  
mentioned by Tim Buckley in his “Song To The Siren.” Since your  
shell in Terminal has the proper settings, you could launch *another*  
Aquamacs Emacs from Terminal as "/Applications/Aquamacs\ Emacs.app/ 
Contents/MacOS/Aquamacs\ Emacs &" or as single application as "open / 
Applications/Aquamacs\ Emacs.app" – without &. The variable process- 
environment has the environment in which Emacs runs. You could also  
create a *shell* buffer inside Emacs and check the *shell* buffer's  
environment. It should be quite the same.

If either of these launch methods does not create a ``-u:´´ mode- 
line, then you have some code, probably in your init file, that  
changes the well derived value to something pre-historic. A

        (prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)

could correct this (or a value of utf-8m, which will help with the  
decomposed file names). (The Emacs Wiki has nodes related to Mac OS X  
and its way to create a process with a link to apple documents.)

> > And you never tried in Finder, best when you have at least one  
> > file starting with a or A and at least another one starting with  
> > � or �, just to type - not in the search hole! � a or �?
>
> Well, after having replied to your message, I understood what you  
> meant. So I created a couple of files called ra, rb, rc, ru and rü.  
> Typing rü in Finder selects ru, not rü ... Finder ain't smarter  
> here. Duh :-(


Pressing TAB you can re-search. Try this, too!

--
Mit friedvollen Grüßen

  Pete

Encryption, n.: A powerful algorithmic encoding technique
                employed in the creation of computer manuals.