Re: "Outer world" encoding for non-Latin1 language environments

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Wed, 27 Feb 2002, Anton Zinoviev wrote:

> Even when users choose some non-Latin1 language environment Emacs
> doesn't suppose that it's new default encoding is actually the
> encoding of the X-clipboard, the console font, etc.  This can be
> easily changed in this way:

Why change it?  The default for X selections is compound-text, which can 
handle many different languages/scripts mixed in a single selection.  
What you propose (to set it to koi8-u) will limit the selections to a 
single charset.  Why is that a good idea?
> 
> (defun setup-koi8u-coding-system () 
>   (let ()
>     (set-keyboard-coding-system 'koi8-u)
>     (set-clipboard-coding-system 'koi8-u)
>     (set-terminal-coding-system 'koi8-u)))

Whether defining a language environment should set keyboard and terminal 
encodings is an old issue, but it isn't a clear-cut one.  It is possible 
that someone defines a language environment but her keyboard and/or 
terminal cannot cope with encoded characters.