{"id":12272,"date":"2024-06-28T12:09:21","date_gmt":"2024-06-28T16:09:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=12272"},"modified":"2024-06-28T12:09:21","modified_gmt":"2024-06-28T16:09:21","slug":"bom-characters-from-windows-files","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=12272","title":{"rendered":"BOM Characters From Windows Files"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\nIt&rsquo;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 <a href=\"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=12256\">Emacs on Windows can be slow<\/a>. Despite the tone that my posts on Windows often take, I <i>do<\/i> want Windows users to be able to enjoy all the benefits that Emacs offers.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nOne of the problems with Window\/Unix interaction is that they made slightly different decisions about file formats. That mostly manifests itself in Windows using <code>CR LF<\/code> for EOL while Unix uses <code>LF<\/code>. This isn&rsquo;t just a matter of Microsoft&rsquo;s contrariness. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rfc-editor.org\/old\/EOLstory.txt\">The choice of CR LF was reasonable at the time<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nOver at the Emacs subreddit, BrainFuckPlusPlus talks about <a href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/emacs\/comments\/1dp5fuu\/bom_characters_in_shellcommandtostring_and_other\/\">another problem<\/a> with using Emacs on Windows. He&rsquo;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.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nThat brings up another remarkable aspect of this story. BrainFuckPlusPlus&rsquo;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.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nZaretskii, 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&rsquo;s yet another demonstration that Eli and the other devs don&rsquo;t get nearly enough credit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&rsquo;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 &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=12272\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-12272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-emacs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12272"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12273,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12272\/revisions\/12273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}