GNU Emacs and UTF-8 locale

Aug 7, 2004

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I recently wanted to shift to a UTF-8 locale, because I wanted to play with stuff like writing in Arabic, and because it seems to be the road forward.
So I switched and GNU Emacs starts to enter garbage in my buffers. I type “Ã¦Ã¸åÃ†Ã˜Ã… éÃÂ€“, but Emacs gives me “ÃƒÂ¦ÃƒÂ¸ÃƒÂ¥ÃƒÃƒÃƒ ÃƒÂ©ÃƒÂÃ¢Â¬“. Ever so slightly less useful, and less readable too.
I tried fiddling with “Options | Mule | Language Environments” and “Options | Mule | Set Coding System”, but to no avail.
Somewhat deluded I gave up and went back to Latin 1, mostly at least. Every once in a while I tried again, and one day I stumbled over a reference to the Emacs file etc/PROBLEMS, a section on problems with UTF-8 support in GNU Emacs. Unfortunately the section was gone from my copy, but I found it on the net.
The solution to all my problems: add the following lines to ~/.emacs:

(setq locale-coding-system 'utf-8)
(set-terminal-coding-system 'utf-8)
(set-keyboard-coding-system 'utf-8)
(set-selection-coding-system 'utf-8)
(prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)

The problem went away and haven’t been seen since.
BTW, I’m using GNU Emacs 21.3.1, installed from Debian testing and unstable (tried them both).

Linux

Comments

9 responses to “GNU Emacs and UTF-8 locale”

jbnote

October 20, 2004

Awesome. Thanks. works also for french keyboards 🙂

Reply
Heinzi (Austria)

December 10, 2004

That’s it… thanks a lot.

Reply
Benoît

January 3, 2005

nearly works : except when i type stuff like “î” (or any compose char). This locks emacs. Looks like “î” is interpreted as a command as it’s displayed in the status bar …

Reply
Thomas

February 10, 2005

For Google indexing:
This page explains how to solve the problem of pasting accents and accented characters from emacs to mozilla firefox.
How to paste accents from emacs to firefox.
Comment copier-coller des accents de emacs vers firefox.
Wie man Umlauts von emacs zum firefox pasted.

Reply
Mark

April 30, 2005

Got it working after some trouble – turns out I had (standard-display-european t) in my .emacs which needed removing.

Reply
artimo

October 26, 2005

This solved problems with UTF-8 characters in Emacs term and ansi-term.

Tio solvis problemojn pri UTF-8-literoj en
Emakso-term kaj ansi-term.

Reply
Øyvind Østlund

February 28, 2006

I just tried this in Emacs in Windows. And it looks like it thinks that every ÆØÅ is a command now. I made a clean _emacs file. So unless there is something else I don’t know it is loading in Windows, then it should have been pretty stright forward, but no..:(

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Steinar Hamdahl

February 12, 2007

I experienced the same problem as Østlund and found that if I just removed the (set-keyboard-coding-system ‘utf-8) line, everything works like a charm.
Thanks for the help – would never have known where to start by myself!

Reply
Viktor

March 15, 2007

Thank you. Same problem with Swedish äåö in emacs on Debian, must have utf-8. Killed two days for that. Now it seems to work. Thanks for sharing info!

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GNU Emacs and UTF-8 locale

Comments

9 responses to “GNU Emacs and UTF-8 locale”

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