Re: Display of undisplayable characters: \U01F3A8 instead of diamond

[Akib Azmain Turja]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
> The text-based Linux console is unable to display many Unicode
> characters.  In Emacs 29, display of undisplayable characters has
> changed.  It used to show them with a diamond.  Now it shows the
> unicode character code as hex, preceded by \U.
>
> I find that change quite inconvenient.  It makes the text harder to
> read.  Showing the codes does no good, since I don't know these codes,
> not even for characters I am familiar with.  To find out what
> character a code represents, I have to use C-u C-x =, just as I did
> before.
>
> I last built the sources in May.  Has this changed in a significant
> way since then?
>
> I could not find, in NEWS, anything about this change -- it ought to
> be in NEWS .  Nor a way to go back to the old
> behavior.  Is there a way?  If not, would people please create a way?
>
> As a separate question, do users generally like this change?
> Would it be better to return to the old diamond method as the default?

I don't think this is a very good change.  It's easy to mistake those \U
codes as text.  If someone really want to see the code, they can use M-x
describe-char.  All terminal emulators broke after this change.  Anyway,
I workarounded it by modifying glyphless-char-display with the following
in terminal buffers:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
(set-char-table-extra-slot glyphless-char-display 0 'thin-space)
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

This shows a single space character.  Though ambitious, at least it save
the terminals.

-- 
Akib Azmain Turja

Find me on Mastodon at @akib@hostux.social.

This message is signed by me with my GnuPG key.  Its fingerprint is:

    7001 8CE5 819F 17A3 BBA6  66AF E74F 0EFA 922A E7F5

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature