Re: Display of undisplayable characters: \U01F3A8 instead of diamond

[Richard Stallman]

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  > Is this specifically about that U+1F3A8 character?  Or is this more
  > general?

This applies to all characters that display that way.  I don't know
what U+1F3A8 stands for; to me, it is simply "some undisplayable character."

  > This is a standard Emacs way of displaying unsupported characters on
  > TTY frames.  I fail to see how this is worse than displaying the same
  > diamond glyph for any unsupported character, because with the
  > character codes you at least know when the characters are different,
  > even without "C-u C-x =".

This change makes it harder to see and recognize the displayable
characters in the line.

When a line contains many nondisplayable characters, this change makes it
much longer, so the line gets continued.

In practice, I can't recognize when the same \U sequence appears more
than once on the screen.  I can't see what the hex digits are just
with a glance; only if I concentrate and read one.  If I do that, I
can't recognize other instances of the same sequence without
concentrating on each of them to read it.

  >   What
  > you saw before was a bug in the way Emacs detected which characters
  > the Linux console is capable of displaying.

I am surprised.  I thought of the diamond display as a feature; ISTR
we discussed it as such.  But maybe I'm mistaken.

Either way, I'd much rather have the diamonds.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)