René's old blog

GNU Emacs and UTF-8 locale

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by

René Seindal
in

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 “æøåÆØÅ é퀓, but Emacs gives me “æøåÃÃà éí⬓. 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).

Comments

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

  1. jbnote avatar
    jbnote

    Awesome. Thanks. works also for french keyboards 🙂

    Reply
  2. Heinzi (Austria) avatar
    Heinzi (Austria)

    That’s it… thanks a lot.

    Reply
  3. Benoît avatar
    Benoît

    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
  4. Thomas avatar
    Thomas

    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
  5. Mark avatar
    Mark

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

    Reply
  6. artimo avatar
    artimo

    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
  7. Øyvind Østlund avatar
    Øyvind Østlund

    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..:(

    Reply
  8. Steinar Hamdahl avatar
    Steinar Hamdahl

    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
  9. Viktor avatar
    Viktor

    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!

    Reply

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