CODEWITHSUNDEEP
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koushik
koushik

Reputation: 196

How do I make Emacs dired mode display unicode characters in windows?

I have emacs 23.3 running on windows XP and I work on some files whose filenames contain a combination of English & devanagari or tamil characters (e.g., que.प्रश्न.txt or ans.பதில்.txt).

When I visit the directory containing this file in Dired, these file names don't appear correctly, even though I can see the names in windows explorer. Dired displays names like "deva~1.txt" for filenames that have begin with english characters but in case of names fully composed of non-english characters it displays something like "47d1~1.txt".

I suppose this has something to do with what Windows internally returns to emacs but I notice that running dir on command-prompt at the same directory displays the full names (even though cmd just renders all non-english characters as ? symbol).

Is there anyway I can enable dired to render filenames with non-english characters correctly?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 774

Answers (1)

Stefan
Stefan

Reputation: 28611

It's actually a limitation of Emacs's implementation. Emacs uses Windows primitives that date back to before Unicode, so any filename with chars that cannot be encoded in your "codepage" will be replaced with the mangled foo~1 name (if your file system is VFAT) or something else in other cases. Hopefully we will soon switch over to the "new" Windows primitives that use UTF-16 (IIRC) and do not suffer from such problems any more. But you may have to wait for Emacs-25.1 for that. It may happen sooner if you give us a hand, tho ;-)

Upvotes: 4

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