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

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 04 May 2015 17:22:17 +0300

> From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
> Date: Sun,  3 May 2015 18:13:10 -0700
> Cc: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
> 
> Although C-x 8 lets you insert arbitrary Unicode characters, it's
> awkward to use this to insert commonly used symbols such as curved
> quotes, the Euro symbol, etc.  This patch adds simpler sequences for
> ISO 8859-15 characters (which includes the Euro), plus characters that
> are commonly found in English text and in basic math.  For example,
> assuming the Alt key works on your keyboard and iso-transl is loaded,
> one can now type "A-[" instead of "A-RET LEFT SIN TAB RET" to get the
> character "‘" (U+2018 LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK).
> * doc/emacs/mule.texi (Unibyte Mode), etc/NEWS: Latin-9 and a few
> other printing characters now work too.
> * lisp/international/iso-transl.el (iso-transl-char-map):
> Also support ISO 8859-15 characters (e.g., "€"), plus the characters
> "–—‘’“”†‡•′″←→↔−≈≠≤≥" which are commonly used in English text
> or basic math.

Shouldn't we prefer input methods instead?  We already have a plethora
of Latin-N-something input methods (including latin-9-prefix), so why
not add more characters there, instead of using iso-transl?

I think input methods generally get less in your way.