Subject: bug#30331: Neither Emacs nor Vim nor Nano handle ligature literal insertion well

From: Alan Third <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2018 23:38:21 +0000

On Fri, Feb 02, 2018 at 04:31:05PM -0600, Andrew Pennebaker wrote:
> I am able to work around this limitation in most applications by
> configuring TextExpander (macOS, Windows) or autokey (Linux) to match the
> keyboard sequence "ae" and replace this with "æ". This allows most UTF-8
> compatible graphical software, from Web browsers to document editors, to
> correctly insert æ in place of ae. However, traditional text editors
> including Emacs, Vim, and Nano are evidently NOT able to handle a literal æ
> rune insertion, and tend to raise a generic error message when the text
> expander application attempts to insert this key.

I’m not sure about the use of TextExpander as I’ve never heard of it
before, but Emacs on macOS can handle the insertion of æ using alt‐’,
but you might need to change the default binding of the alt key
(https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsForMacOS#toc30).

Aside from that Emacs allows you to enter æ using:

    C-x 8 RET LATIN SMALL LETTER AE

It’s a bit of a handful though, I know, but you can enter all sorts of
things:

    ﬄ ﬁ 🙲

You should be able to configure abbrev-mode to automatically convert
ae to æ. Or maybe prettify symbols mode would do:

    http://www.modernemacs.com/post/prettify-mode/

Proper ligature support is purely a presentation issue, though, and
should happen automatically on software that supports it even if
you’re loading in text written in software that doesn’t.
-- 
Alan Third