Subject: bug#20499: [PROPOSED PATCH] C-x 8 shorthands for curved quotes, Euro, etc.

From: Richard Stallman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 09 May 2015 10:17:15 -0400

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  > > That is a lot less input than the other method, and is sort of usable,
  > > but inconvenient.  I tried it in that very case.
  > > 
  > > It includes Coptic characters as well as Greek; I don't know why.

  > I don't know either.  If I type TAB after just "greek", then I see no
  > Coptic characters in completion candidates.  What did you type before
  > asking for completion?

I typed C-x 8 RET greek TAB TAB.

All the NAMES that appear start with "Greek", but when I inserted
GREEK CAPITAL LETTER HORI and examined it with C-u C-x =,
it said

  name: COPTIC CAPITAL LETTER HORI
  old-name: GREEK CAPITAL LETTER HORI

I didn't notice the old-name field the previous time.  I suppose that
explains why it was included in that completion table.  Anyway that
completion list is over 440 lines long, and not very useful.

  > > It also includes many punctuation characters, and letters with
  > > diacritics, that are in a different part of Unicode, and are not
  > > normal Greek letters.

  > This is simple Emacs completion at work: it brings you every character
  > whose name begins with "GREEK".

Do you think I don't know that?

_Why_ it does what it does is not the issue.  The only pertinent point
is that that it isn't a convenient way to do what I want to do.

  > As for letters with diacriticals, how would Emacs know that you don't
  > need those?

That question is spurious.  Remember, I don't want to enter a
character name at all.  I want to see all the glyphs.

Someone else suggested that C-x 8 RET might be a convenient alternate
method.  I am explaining why it isn't.

If I had the feature I want, I would see the segment including the
usual Greek letters, and the far more numerous diacriticalized ones
would not be there (because they come later in Unicode).

  > If you only want letters, you can give a more accurate spec to
  > completion: "C-x 8 RET greek*letter <TAB> <TAB>".  (The asterisk is a
  > wildcard character.)  That still produces quite a long list,

Indeed, it is still inconvenient.

  > I hope you now agree that the use case of searching for a character
  > with only some vague idea about its appearance and/or name needs some
  > pretty sophisticated (and overlapping) capabilities for allowing the
  > user to specify what she knows, before showing the possible
  > candidates.

We seem to be totally miscommunicating.  I DON'T WANT to search for
them by name.  I never asked for that.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
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