It’s been a slow day on the Intertubes for Irreal material but I do have something that might interest those of you who have the misfortune to be running Emacs on Windows. Just the other day, we discussed the sad fact that Emacs on Windows can be slow. Despite the tone that my posts on Windows often take, I do want Windows users to be able to enjoy all the benefits that Emacs offers.
One of the problems with Window/Unix interaction is that they made slightly different decisions about file formats. That mostly manifests itself in Windows using CR LF for EOL while Unix uses LF. This isn’t just a matter of Microsoft’s contrariness. The choice of CR LF was reasonable at the time.
Over at the Emacs subreddit, BrainFuckPlusPlus talks about another problem with using Emacs on Windows. He’s an Emacs user working in a shop dominated by VSCode users. Apparently VSCode saves files with a BOM sequence starting the file and he was trying to get Emacs to ignore the BOM by setting the Emacs coding method. He found a solution but that solution caused problems in another area.
That brings up another remarkable aspect of this story. BrainFuckPlusPlus’s question was answered by Eli Zaretskii, the main Emacs maintainer. This was an obscure question on reddit, not the Emacs-Devel mailing list, and yet Zaretskii took notice and explained what BrainFuckPlusPlus should do to resolve it.
Zaretskii, like most FOSS maintainers, doubtlessly has a job and a family demanding first claim on his time but he still found a few minutes to help an Emacs user with an arcane problem. It’s yet another demonstration that Eli and the other devs don’t get nearly enough credit.