[bloak]

Yes, I finally got around to adding some "quail" stuff to my .emacs so that I can directly type various kinds of quotation mark and dash rather than rely on complex conversion rules that sometimes go wrong.

The lack of first-class support for balanced quotation marks seems to be a major problem for computers. I think a lot of computer code, particularly scripts, would be easier to read and less buggy if the languages had been designed by someone with balanced quotation marks on their keyboard.

As a thought experiment, imagine what Lisp would look like if '(' and ')' were the same character and you had to use the same work-arounds that shell scripts use for open quotation mark and close quotation mark being the same character. Instead of (a ((b c) d)) we'd write |a \|\\\|b c\\\| d\||. That's fine, right? We can live with that?

Perhaps we should think ourselves lucky that 0 and O are not the same character, and 1 and l, like they were on the first mechanical typewriters.

Mind you, there's one similar annoyance that predates typewriters and continues to plague us in Unicode: apostrophe and closing single quotation mark are logically quite different things, but they're the same character: ’

[enriquto]

> Yes, I finally got around to adding some "quail" stuff to my .emacs

Why into .emacs and not into the global keyboard configuration? Don't you ever write text outside of emacs?

[bloak]

Yes, good question. One reason is that I haven't found a convenient portable way of modifying Linux keyboard configurations. Another is that sometimes I'm SSH-ing in from a machine that isn't even Linux.

I have used xkbcomp to replace a character I don't need with one I do, but the recipe tends to require maintenance and I don't know how to program dead keys with that approach. Perhaps there's a better way nowadays.

[enriquto]

I was somehow expecting the answer to be: "Yes, I do all my keyboard input from inside emacs, including running the shell".

For linux-portable keyboard configuration, you may find that an unholy mix of setxbmap (to set up the grand options) and xmodmap (to modify a few particular keys) is what works best for you. At least it does for me.

> sometimes I'm SSH-ing in from a machine that isn't even Linux.

ah! the horror!