tlug: Re: Emacs 20

[Krister Joas <joask@example.com>]

Craig Oda writes:

> you solved my problem.  Thank you.  I'm not that familiar with
> emacs, is fontset a new feature?  I wonder why I have to set the
> font to fontset-standard, shouldn't this be the default?

I'm glad I could be of help.  The concept of fontsets has been around
for a while, at least in earlier versions of Mule but I don't remember
if was called something different.  I think fontsets are meant as a
way to collect fonts which work together.  In my opinion this is a big
win compared to the heuristics used by XEmacs, which gets it wrong 90%
of the time.  Scaling fonts is usually a bad idea in X, it looks
terrible, especially the Japanese fonts.  Regardless of how atrocious
the innards of vanilla Emacs is compared to XEmacs, the FSF people at
least manages fonts much better from a user's point view.  One glitch
however is that there seem to be a problem when specifying fontsets in
X resources.  I put the following in my resource file:

  Emacs*font:	fontset-standard

It works and sets the fontset correctly but always prints a warning:

  Warning: Cannot convert string "fontset-standard" to type FontStruct

I don't see it because I start Emacs from a menu and since it works
it's ok by me.

> I have one other question, have you been able to get bash
> to run within term of emacs and get it to display Japanese
> from the shell?
>   M-x term

Hmm, I don't really know off hand but I would guess that you have to
fiddle around with process coding systems.  Have a look at the
function set-process-coding-system for instance.  There might be a
higher level interface too.  You can for example set the default
process coding system by tinkering with the variable
default-process-coding-system--I think.  I'll have a look for you if
you want.  Actually, I see now that there is a command called
set-buffer-process-coding-system which can be reached with C-xC-mp
(it's also in the Mule menu if you prefer) which might be of help.
Just tried it and it works, but not the input of Japanese.  That can
actually be because of bugs in Emacs.  I'll have a look later.

The Mule part of Emacs 20 is actually reasonably well documented.
Check out the chapter about I18N in the info documentation.

> GNU Emacs 20.2 seems considerably faster than XEmacs 20.3.

Absolutely, XEmacs is just painfully slow.  Unfortunately vm isn't
supported yet (but I use it anyway) on Emacs 20.  One of these days
I'll see if I can't make vm a little more well behaved with Emacs.

-- 
Krister
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