gmane.emacs.help

Re: Can't respond to B. T. Raven nihilo.net>

Peter Dyballa — 2012-05-25T09:03:30

Am 25.05.2012 um 05:19 schrieb MBR:


I think on this list we are supposed to respond to all, to the whole list and to the author of the referenced eMail.

--
Greetings

  Pete

How many Microsoft engineers does it take to screw in a light-bulb?
None.
They just redefine "dark" as the new standard.

Re: those funny non-ASCII characters

Eli Zaretskii — 2012-05-25T06:36:20

With cursor on that character, type "C-u C-x =", and Emacs will show
everything it knows about that character, including its canonical
name.

Re: How to disable warnings/questions when using desktop-save-mode?

Kevin Rodgers — 2012-05-25T04:20:09

(setq desktop-load-locked-desktop t)


I think you need to make sure each instance has its own value of desktop
base-file-name and/or desktop-base-lock-name, effectively defeating the
locking mechanism altogether.  You could do that by appending the PID
returned by (emacs-pid) to those variables in your ~/.emacs:

(setq desktop-base-lock-name
       (convert-standard-filename (format ".emacs.desktop.lock-%d" (emacs-pid))))

or:

(eval-after-load 'desktop
   '(setq desktop-base-lock-name
 (format "%s-%d" desktop-base-lock-name (emacs-pid))))

and probably the same for desktop-base-lock-name.

Can't respond to B. T. Raven nihilo.net>

MBR — 2012-05-25T03:19:32

Sorry to bother the whole list with this, but it's the only way I can 
get a message through to "B. T. Raven" <nihil< at >nihilo.net>.

"B. T. Raven" <nihil< at >nihilo.net> responded on this list to my question 
about Emacs replace functions sometimes not working.  But when I tried 
to respond to his email, my response bounced with:

        This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

        A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
        recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

           nihil< at >nihilo.net
             SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO:<nihil< at >nihilo.net>:
             host mailserver.nihilo.net [213.171.216.114]:
             550<nihil< at >nihilo.net>: Recipient address rejected:
             User unknown in virtual mailbox table

In case nihil< at >nihilo.net is reading this list, do you have any idea why 
your mailserver is rejecting emails addressed to you?  Is there an 
alternate email address I can mail you at?

        Mark Rosenthal
        mbr< at >arlsoft.com <mailto:mbr< at >arlsoft.com>

Re: Why do replace commands sometimes not work?

MBR — 2012-05-25T03:01:27

I'm not surprised that you can't reproduce it.  It's so unpredictable 
that it reminds me of an assembly language bug I diagnosed many years 
ago where the code turned out to be making a critical decision based on 
data it fetched from an uninitialized memory location.  In the case of 
this bug, the state of memory could depend on every keystroke I've typed 
since I started Emacs, the contents of every file it's opened, etc.

The example I gave was to illustrate the sort of problem I'm running 
into, to see if anyone else has encountered the same problem.  I'd be 
thrilled if I could come up with a reproducible example, but I've had no 
luck on that front so far.

    Mark

Re: Why do replace commands sometimes not work?

B. T. Raven — 2012-05-25T02:41:08

Die Thu May 24 2012 18:15:40 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time) MBR
<mbr< at >arlsoft.com> scripsit:



I can't reproduce that misbehavior on w32 ver 23.1
Both in *scratch* (lisp mode) and a junk file in text mode I get:

John Jacob Jingleheimerschmidt
" John Jacob Jingleheimerschmidt"
" John Jacob Jingleheimerschmidt"
 John Jacob Jingleheimerschmidt
 John Jacob Jingleheimerschmidt

where the second and third lines were originally camel-case in quotes.
I did assign the macro to a keychord with C-xC-kb

Ed

Re: those funny non-ASCII characters

Xah Lee — 2012-05-25T00:56:59


better to embrace unicode than fight it.

what encoding you have when you paste is rather complex. I guess it
depends on the sources you copy from, as each web page can be in diff
charset and encoding then am not sure your OS do some translation in
the pasteboard.

maybe this will help.

〈Emacs File/Character Encoding/Decoding FAQ〉
http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs_encoding_decoding_faq.html

〈Xah's Unicode Tutorial〉
http://xahlee.org/Periodic_dosage_dir/unicode.html

to replace non-ascii, you can use the regex

[[:nonascii:]]+

〈Char Classes - GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual〉
http://xahlee.org/emacs_manual/elisp/Char-Classes.html

〈Emacs Lisp: Convert Unicode String to ASCII (Zap Gremlins)〉
http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs_zap_gremlins.html

 Xah

those funny non-ASCII characters

Buchs, Kevin — 2012-05-24T23:49:29

I often paste content from web pages into an emacs org-mode buffer and I
get the odd quote characters or dashes that are not ASCII. I created a
lisp function to remove the unicode ones that are just 8 bits. Lately I
am seeing that there are characters that are not being caught. They show
up in emacs as the expected character. When I kill/yank them into lisp
code, they are not being found. When I save the buffer, I am asked for
coding and chose raw text. When the file is opened again, these
characters are showing up as some sort of special symbol (dashed circle
with flag off the top) followed by doubles/triples of \2xx. For example,
the dash character I just stored was this sequence: circle-flag \200
\231. Using Gnu/Linux od to dump them I get hex strings such as: 340 245
206 340 244 206 210 200 and for the dash mentioned above 342 200 231. 

I am very naive in regard to coding, so please excuse my ignorance. I
would guess these are 16-bit (Unicode16) characters. Can someone
enlighten me as to how I can determine what these characters are (after
pasted into a buffer) and how I can code a function to replace them with
ASCII equivalents? The only thing I could think of was hexl mode, but
that didn't turn out well. Thanks.

Kevin Buchs | Senior Engineer | SPPDG | 507-538-5459 |
buchs.kevin< at >mayo.edu
Mayo Clinic | 200 First Street SW | Rochester, MN 55905 |
http://www.mayo.edu/sppdg

Why do replace commands sometimes not work?

MBR — 2012-05-24T23:15:40

There's a problem I've encountered with Emacs for many years.  I never 
reported it because I've been running Emacs 21.3 under Windows, and I 
figured that Emacs users on Windows are probably a very small percentage 
of Emacs users, and that 21.3 is so old that it nobody would be 
interested in debugging the problem.

But then I encountered the same problem with Emacs 23.2.1 running under 
Linux.  And a few days ago I finally installed Windows Emacs 23.4.1, and 
it's got the same problem.

The problem: the replace commands, M-x replace-string and M-x 
replace-regexp, sometimes work and sometimes don't.  When it doesn't 
work, it often will work if I retype exactly the same command a few times.

My reaction when I first encountered the problem was that I must have 
mistyped the command the first time.  But I've encountered it for so 
many years that whenever it fails to work the first time, it's become 
habit for me to be extremely careful in my typing the second and 
subsequent times, and it  often fails on those tries too, but eventually 
succeeds.

I particularly notice it when I'm defining a macro [ delimited by C-x ( 
and C-x ) ].  And frequently I have the buffer narrowed to a small 
subset of text that I want to operate on.  But I don't know for certain 
that defining a macro or having the buffer narrowed are what cause the 
problem to manifest.

I now have a concrete example of this that proves that it's not due to 
my mistyping.  There's a point in the macro where the buffer has been 
narrowed to a portion  that contains a symbol in CamelCase.

    Note: In case you're unfamiliar with CamelCase, it's a convention
    for variable names originally popularized by the X Window System. 
    Earlier conventions for C and C++ used "_" as a word delimiter
    within variable names.  Lisp used "-" instead of "_".  CamelCase,
    so-called because the capital letters in the middle of the word form
    humps like those on a camel's back, uses capital letters to indicate
    the beginning of a new word.  So, the C-style variable name
    find_char_in_string, or Lisp-style variable name
    find-char-in-string, in CamelCase is findCharInString.

The purpose of this part of the macro is to turn CamelCase into 
space-separated words.

        M-<                    ;; Go to beginning of narrowed buffer
        M-x replace-regexp RET
        [A-Z] RET              ;; Find any capital letter
        C-q SPC \& RET         ;; Replace it with a space followed by itself
        M-<                    ;; Go to beginning of narrowed buffer
        C-d                    ;; Delete the unwanted space before the
        first letter

So, if the narrowed portion of the buffer contains:

        "JohnJacobJingleheimerschmidt"

after running this portion of the macro, it should contain:

        "John Jacob Jingleheimerschmidt"

Instead, when run in Emacs 23, the result is:

        "ohnJacobJingleheimerschmidt"

which is exactly what you'd expect if the M-x replace-regexp failed to 
do the replacement that it should have.  But since I know that sometimes 
a replace command works the second time after failing to work the first 
time, I modified that portion of the macro to do the replace twice:

        M-<                    ;; Go to beginning of narrowed buffer
        M-x replace-regexp RET
        [A-Z] RET              ;; Find any capital letter
        C-q SPC \& RET         ;; Replace it with a space followed by itself
        M-<                    ;; Go to beginning of narrowed buffer
        M-x replace-regexp RET
        [A-Z] RET              ;; Find any capital letter
        C-q SPC \& RET         ;; Replace it with a space followed by itself
        M-<                    ;; Go to beginning of narrowed buffer
        C-d                    ;; Delete the unwanted space before the
        first letter

Now, if the replace were working the first time, applying it again would 
produce the undesired result:

        " John  Jacob  Jingleheimerschmidt"

Instead, it produces:

        "John Jacob Jingleheimerschmidt"

Does anybody here have any idea what's going wrong here?

    Mark Rosenthal
    mbr< at >arlsoft.com <mailto:mbr< at >arlsoft.com>

P.S. - One further clue: In the older version of Emacs (21.3) I've 
noticed that at those times when the replace fails to work, if I repeat 
the replace command with C-x ESC ESC, the minibuffer shows:

        (replace-regexp "[A-Z]" " \\&" nil sss eee)

where sss and eee are integers that are supposed to indicate the 
beginning and end characters of the region to operate on, but when the 
replace has failed, sss and eee specify a small subset of the region.

Re: Reading OS Version and decide what to do?

Pascal J. Bourguignon — 2012-05-24T18:44:09



emacs has a few variables that let you know what environment it's
running in:


;; system-type          darwin   gnu/linux  cygwin
;; system-name          "naiad.informatimago.com" "hermes.afaa.asso.fr"
;; system-configuration "i686-pc-linux-gnu" "i686-pc-cygwin" "i386-apple-darwin9.8.0"
;; window-system        nil x mac ns w32
;; emacs-major-version  18 19 20 21 23
;; emacs-minor-version  0 1 2 3
;; emacs-version        "20.7.2" "21.2.1" 

Of course, you can also use

(shell-command-to-string "uname -a")
--> "Linux kuiper 2.6.38-gentoo-r6-pjb-c9 #2 SMP Wed Jul 13 00:23:08 CEST 2011 x86_64 Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 950 < at > 3.07GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux
"

and parse it.

Reading OS Version and decide what to do?

Daniel (Youngwhan — 2012-05-24T17:25:29

Hi,

I have no knowledge about Emacs LISP, but is there any way to get what
os version is being used?

For example, on linux and bash and external utility like cut, I can
get the os version by "uname -r" and get what I want by using cut
utility.

Is there a way to simulate like that in Emacs LISP? like launching
external process like "cut" or "uname -r" and get a string and if the
string matches what I want, do something and otherwise, do others?

Daniel

Re: How to disable warnings/questions when using desktop-save-mode?

Marius Hofert — 2012-05-24T08:05:43

Precisely what I was looking for, many thanks, Xah. 

Xah Lee <xahlee< at >gmail.com> writes:

Re: Table formatting (cell padding) and navigation

Xah Lee — 2012-05-24T01:03:45

C-h f then the command name, then click the link to see the source
code. Then, search for word map.

C-h m (describe-mode) is only for major mode. Minor mode doesn't have
such documentation.

i wrote a tutorial on table. Might be helpful.

〈Emacs: Working with Tables〉
http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs_table.html

 Xah

Re: Umlauts on Mac in 24 pretest

Xah Lee — 2012-05-23T17:37:50

On May 23, 8:59 am, Neuwirth Erich <erich.neuwi...< at >univie.ac.at>
wrote:

there are so many solutions to your question. I type unicode a lot…
and have few hundred personal keys in emacs as well OS-wide.

Here's some solutions to your issue:

〈Using Emacs's Abbrev Mode for Abbreviation〉
http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs_abbrev_mode.html

〈Designing a Math Symbols Input System〉
http://xahlee.org/comp/design_math_symbol_input.html

〈Emacs: How to define Super ＆ Hyper Keys〉
http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs_hyper_super_keys.html

 Xah

Re: How to disable warnings/questions when using desktop-save-mode?

Xah Lee — 2012-05-24T00:31:38

see the desktop section at

http://code.google.com/p/ergoemacs/source/browse/trunk/ergoemacs/init_settings.el

 Xat

Re: Umlauts on Mac in 24 pretest

ken — 2012-05-23T19:43:35

For a few years I've been wanting to do the same.  I've tried various 
ways and recently came upon SCIM.  It's an application which comes with 
Linux (at least my CentOS distribution).... so it's free and open source 
software (FOSS).  So you probably could find it for OS X.  Or maybe it's 
already installed.

It's just a tiny block in the lower-left corner of the screen and you 
can set it to any one of several dozen languages/alphabets... on the 
fly.... even in the middle of using an application.  Yes, not only does 
it work for emacs, but for every application I run-- web pages (where 
you input text), email, IM windows, on the command line, in other 
editors... everything.  The default coding on my system (set in the OS) 
is UTF-8.  In SCIM I select latin-pre.  This enables me to easily type 
characters like ä, ë, ö, ü, «, », and ß, as well as French characters 
like é and è and ç and Spanish characters such as ñ and ¿.  And other 
characters such as ½, ¾, and ¼.  And many more.  It's all very easy. 
It's great.  It's what I've been hoping for für eine sehr lange Zeit. 
No special configuration in emacs or in any other app is needed at all. 
  You just start using it.

If the characters in this email don't appear accurately in your email 
reader, select UTF-8 as your character encoding.


hth,
ken

Re: Umlauts on Mac in 24 pretest

Stefan Monnier — 2012-05-23T16:43:04

There are *many* ways to enter non-ASCII characters, so you'll have to
give us more details as to what you consider "easy".

Some of the ways to do that are specific to Emacs (e.g. C-u C-\
latin-1-postfix), while others depend on the keyboard layout you use,
the ways you normally enter those non-ASCII chars, and the way modifiers
are mapped in Emacs.

Personally under X11, I like to use the "compose" key (aka "Multi_key"),
so I can hit "compose ' e" to get a "é" and "compose . ." to get a "…".


        Stefan

Re: Umlauts on Mac in 24 pretest

Jambunathan K — 2012-05-23T16:44:43

OP can also do a 

M-x set-language-environment RET German RET 

In my machine, when I toggle input method with C-\ and do a M-x
describe-input-method RET, I see this:

,----
| Input method: german-postfix (mode line indicator:DE<)
| 
| German (Deutsch) input method
| 
| ae  -> ä
| aee -> ae
| oe  -> ö
| oee -> oe
| ue  -> ü (not after a/e/q)
| uee -> ue
| sz  -> ß
| szz -> sz
`----

Doug Lewan <dougl< at >shubertticketing.com> writes:

Re: Umlauts on Mac in 24 pretest

Peter Dyballa — 2012-05-23T16:43:38

Am 23.05.2012 um 17:59 schrieb Neuwirth Erich:


Use your own keyboard layout! Make another key the alt-key!

--
Mit friedvollen Grüßen

  Pete

Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.
– Oscar Wilde

RE: Umlauts on Mac in 24 pretest

Doug Lewan — 2012-05-23T16:32:48

If you're running a GUI version of emacs the Options menu has an item for Mule (Multilingual Environment).
You can follow it until you find something appropriate for German.

There's also C-\ (toggle-input-method) which you could set to latin-1-prefix.
Then "a should type ä for you. "s gets ß.

You could pick any of many other input methods, but Latin 1 seems simple and pretty good for most european languages.

,Doug

Re: Umlauts on Mac in 24 pretest

Jambunathan K — 2012-05-23T16:23:42

Does toggling between input methods work for you?

I am not familiar with any of the European languages (other than
English).  For example, with latin-1-alt-postfix as an input method, you
can input the character under question with a".

,----
| Input method: latin-1-postfix (mode line indicator:1<)
| 
| Latin-1 character input method with postfix modifiers
| 
|              | postfix | examples
|  ------------+---------+----------
|   acute      |    '    | a' -> á
|   grave      |    `    | a` -> à
|   circumflex |    ^    | a^ -> â
|   diaeresis  |    "    | a" -> ä
|   tilde      |    ~    | a~ -> ã
|   cedilla    |    ,    | c, -> ç
|   nordic     |    /    | d/ -> ð   t/ -> þ   a/ -> å   e/ -> æ   o/ -> ø
|   others     |    /    | s/ -> ß   ?/ -> ¿   !/ -> ¡   // -> °
|              | various | << -> «   >> -> »   o_ -> º   a_ -> ª
| 
| Doubling the postfix separates the letter and postfix: e.g. a'' -> a'
`----