Re: [Emacs-diffs] master 9ce1d38: Use curved quotes in core elisp diagnostics

[Óscar Fuentes]

Paul Eggert <address@hidden> writes:

> Alan Mackenzie wrote:
>> Nobody having to type "Ó" on a Spanish keyboard layout
>> would have any trouble.
>
> Spanish keyboards typically do not have "Ó", so your restrictive
> definition of "working" would say that "Ó" is trouble even on a
> Spanish keyboard.

Every Spaniard who ever used a typewriter knows that accented letters
are composed like this: `o. This is not a problem at all and the
approach generalizes to others cases, such as French and Catalonian,
which have more accent types than Spanish. An Spaniard would have no
problem at all typing the French è, for instance. Furthermore, an
Spaniard would have no problem using an USA keyboard with the
USA-international input method: we quickly figure out that ñ is ~n.

However, I need to learn how to write the curly quotes, and then
remember the method. This makes things harder for us occasional
contributors, not to mention beginners. I'm pretty sure that copy&paste
will become more popular with this convention.

I admit that curly quotes are nicer, but that's easily achievable: make
them appear on *Help* and other buffers that shows docstrings. Dmitry
suggests this, and his comment about modern markup languages restricting
themselves to ASCII is something to think about.

If your goal is to make Emacs more Unicode-friendly, this is not the way
to go. Identify the problematic areas, taking feedback from users like
Chad Brown, and then proceed to fix those shortcomings with those users
acting as "customers" (i.e. judges of the proposed solution.)

I admit that I'm intrigued by your plan about how this change will
initiate an evolution on Emacs input system that will make easier to
type exotic characters (defining "exotic" by "something that it is
infrequent in your daily usage.") Maybe describing the specific
user-visible improvements that this change will help to bring into
reality would buy you more support.