[OS X Emacs] M-x shell and file names with umlauts

[David Reitter]

On 7 Oct 2008, at 14:49, Ian Eure wrote:
>>
>> then, suddenly, "ls" does the right thing!  I'm not sure what the  
>> correct setting for the language bit would be - en_US.UTF-8 works  
>> just as well.
>>
> The format is:
>
> lang_COUNTRY.ENCODING
>
> e.g. en_US.UTF-8 is US English encoded in UTF-8.

Well yeah, I tried de_DE first because my test file name had a German  
language umlaut, but the language doesn't matter for the coding when  
it's UTF-8.  The real question is how I would detect the right  
language from the user's settings.  You address this question:

> I don't know if Emacs even has the ability to set environment  
> variables for inferior processes. I think this is the job of your  
> shell or system init files. I'd suggest adding this to your  
> ~/.profile:
>
> eval `locale | sed 's/^/export /'`

Well I wouldn't ever want to alter the user's .profile from Aquamacs,  
but of course I can set an env variable from within Emacs, and  
inferior processes should inherit that.
(M-x shell does not seem to start a login shell, by the way - just a  
shell).

The other problem is that from M-x shell, this is my locale:

~$ locale
LANG=
LC_COLLATE="C"
LC_CTYPE="C"
LC_MESSAGES="C"
LC_MONETARY="C"
LC_NUMERIC="C"
LC_TIME="C"
LC_ALL=
~$

and from a login shell opened in iTerm, I get

~$ locale
LANG="en_GB.US-ASCII"
LC_COLLATE="en_GB.US-ASCII"
LC_CTYPE="en_GB.US-ASCII"
LC_MESSAGES="en_GB.US-ASCII"
LC_MONETARY="en_GB.US-ASCII"
LC_NUMERIC="en_GB.US-ASCII"
LC_TIME="en_GB.US-ASCII"
LC_ALL=
~$


Neither of them would be sufficient to display non-ASCII file names.

Isn't at least the coding part of the locale up to the terminal that  
is being used, i.e. Emacs with it's shell buffer?

> Setting the coding-system for process I/O like you did (C-x RET p)  
> is a part of setting your language environment. I'd suggest you set  
> it to UTF-8, which can be accomplished by going to Options ->  
> Language -> Set Language Environment -> UTF-8.

So, just to make it clear, you're suggesting that we set the default  
language environment that an Aquamacs user gets, to UTF-8?
Sounds to me like this has some grave implications.  Originally I was  
thinking of just modifying what M-x shell does, but of course one  
could consider this.


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