[climacs-devel] Unicode support in Climacs

[Robert Strandh]

JC Helary writes:
 > tell you that in 2006, any text editor that does not support Unicode  
 > for at least the 10 biggest languages in the world is not going to go  
 > very far.
 > 
 > And that has to be intuitive too. If possible with no need to set  
 > obscure parameters hidden in the GUI (a la Mule), with no need to  
 > install separate input systems (a la X11) etc.

There are two cases, one easy and one hard.  The easy one is when the
keyboard and X11 are configured to send the right events.  Then, all
Climacs has to do is insert the corresponding Unicode character.  The
hard one is when you need to type characters that do not appeaar on
your keyboard.  In my opinion, though, this should not be dealt with
at the level of Climacs, but globally in CLIM, or perhaps the X11
backend, or even by X11 itself (for consistency between
applications). 

 > Everything from input to display to file saving/opening has to be  
 > relatively smooth otherwise the application is useless.
 > 
 > I read somewhere that the only Common Lisp that supports Unicode  
 > fully is CLISP, it is a pity the other are either not "compliant" or  
 > default on latin-1.

I think SBCL fully supports Unicode as well. 

 > It is about time people understand that "text" in "text editor" is  
 > not anymore synonymous with "ascii"... :)

I agree.  It was for that reason Climacs was designed from the start
so that the buffer can contain any Unicode character, and in fact, any
CL object.  

-- 
Robert Strandh

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