Re: [TIP] Get rid of the `foo' eyesore

[Jesper Harder]

Oliver Scholz <alkibiades@gmx.de> writes:

> Jesper Harder <harder@myrealbox.com> writes:
>
>> There's an entrenched habit in Emacs and Info of abusing ` (grave
>> accent) and ' (apostrophe) as left and right single quotation marks.
>>
>> They aren't, and it looks horrible.
>>
>> Some old broken X fonts do have the "wrong" glyphs in those positions
>> -- that's probably how the habit started.  But fortunately there's a
>> better way to get rid of the eyesore than using a broken font.  By
>> modifying the display table like this
>>
>>   (aset standard-display-table ?` [342392])  ; ‘
>>   (aset standard-display-table ?' [342393])  ; ’
>
> But this changes the appearance of ` and ' in all places, even where
> they are not perused as quotation marks.

Yup, but that's more or less what I want.  For example ` in Lisp is
called the backqoute construct, not the grave accent construct :-)

I'm pretty sure that the glyph most people saw on their terminals when
the backquote syntax was invented was ‘ rather than `.  I guess the
same applies to shell syntax and TeX (I think Knuth mentions the
problem somewhere in the TeX book).