In the bad old days this used to be quite a hassle. Every separate
program had to be convinced individually to leave your bits alone.
Not that all is easy now, but recently a lot of gnu utilities have
learned to react to LC_CTYPE=iso_8859_1 or LC_CTYPE=iso-8859-1.
Try this first, and if it doesn't help look at the hints below.
Note that in recent versions of libc the routine setlocale() only
works if you have installed the locale files (e.g. in
/usr/lib/locale).
NOTE! The above was written years ago. Today locale stuff is a bit different.
Try the command locale -a to see which locales are available.
Then use one of these locale names instead of the iso_8859-1
mentioned above. For example, LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.ISO-8859-1 or
LC_CTYPE=fr_FR@euro.
NOTE! Some of the below may still be true. Most of it is outdated. (Please report on what is incorrect today, so that it can be deleted.)
First of all, the 8-th bit should survive the kernel input processing,
so make sure to have stty cs8 -istrip -parenb set.
A. For emacs the details strongly depend on the version.
The information below is for version 19.34. Put lines
(set-input-mode nil nil 1)
(standard-display-european t)
(require 'iso-syntax)
$HOME/.emacs.
The first line (to be precise: the final 1)
tells emacs not to discard the 8-th bit from input characters.
The second line tells emacs not to display non-ASCII characters
as octal escapes.
The third line specifies the syntactic properties
and case conversion table for the Latin-1 character set
These last two lines are superfluous if you have something like
LC_CTYPE=ISO-8859-1 in your environment.
(The variable may also be LC_ALL or even LANG.
The value may be anything with a substring `88591' or `8859-1'
or `8859_1'.)
This is a good start. On a terminal that cannot display non-ASCII ISO 8859-1 symbols, the command
(load-library "iso-ascii")
(load-library "iso-transl")