Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 91776
Typing degree sign or other iso-transl symbols in GNU Emacs causes Emacs to lock up
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:54:04 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20030225 Description of problem: Typing an ISO degree sign in Emacs (with C-x 8 o) in fundamental mode or in text mode (and probably others), instead of inserting the degree symbol, causes Emacs to display the degree symbol in the message buffer followed by a dash, as if it was supposed to be some sort of prefix command. At work, I use a locally-compiled GNU Emacs 21 (not sure offhand of the exact version) under Solaris, and "C-x 8 o" inserts the degree symbol as documented. I've tried a couple of other C-x 8 ISO sequences under RH9's GNU Emacs, and they all produce the same effect. There's an additional quirk I observe when I use my .emacs file. (Of course, I tried emacs -q to make sure it was reproducible under a default installation; the bug still happens). I use type-break-mode, and when I enter C-x 8 o, and then hit a couple of other keys, the counter "Warning: typing break due in N keystrokes." counts down rapidly to negative numbers just before Emacs freezes. Depending on whether or not focus has been shifted away from the Emacs window, Emacs is either locked up hard, and no longer even redraws in the former case, or is just lost in thought and can be arrested with a C-g. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): emacs-21.2-33 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. emacs [Enter] 2. Press Ctrl-X, then "8", then "o" 3. Wait a second, observe the degree symbol in the wrong buffer 4. Press any other keys until Emacs has locked up 5. To get it running again, Press Ctrl-G, or to make it lock up hard, give another window focus momentarily, after which switching to another workspace and back leaves the Emacs window only partially redrawn. Expected Results: A degree symbol (�) should be inserted. Additional info: "C-x 8 ~ SPC" successfully inserts a "~". Emacs under RH9 also seems to have issues with getting non-ASCII characters pasted in from the Character Map app, even when they correspond to normal 8-bit ISO-whatever characters. Some of them work, and some of them don't. The behavior appears to be very strange and inconsistent.
What locale are you using? I only see something like what you describe in ja_JP.eucJP locale, where `C-x 8 o' is bound to something else. Can you try updating to the emacs-21.3 in rawhide and see if the problem goes away for you there?
% set LANG=en_US.UTF-8 I think this was the installation default. At least, I don't remember changing any language settings during installation or after. Running Emacs like this: LANG=en_US.ISO-8859-1 emacs & Appears to fix the problem. I only tried one symbol (the degree sign) before I had to run off to work, but I suspect this fixes all of them. The same solution was proposed for some severe display problems I had with gnumeric. (Bug 89761.) Perhaps gnumeric and emacs (no doubt among others) should ship with a wrapper which checks for problematic locales.
This works fine the latest emacs packages afaict. Could you please one of those? Thanks.