How to make Emacs standby display Unicode characters in windows?

Question

I have emacs 23.3 running on Windows XP and am working on some files whose file names contain a combination of English and 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 are not displayed correctly, although I can see the names in Windows Explorer. Dired displays names such as "deva ~ 1.txt" for file names that begin with English characters, but for names that are entirely non-English characters, something like "47d1 ~ 1.txt" is displayed.

I believe this has something to do with what Windows internally returns to emacs, but I notice that running dir on the command line in the same directory displays the full names (although cmd just displays all non-English characters as a character ? ).

Anyway, can I enable the step-by-step rendering function of file names with non-English characters?

Answer 1

This is actually a limitation of the implementation of Emacs. Emacs uses Windows primitives that date back to Unicode, so any file name with characters that cannot be encoded in your "code page" will be replaced with the changed name foo ~ 1 (if your file system is VFAT) or something else in other cases. We hope that soon we will move on to the "new" Windows primitives that use UTF-16 (IIRC) and no longer experience such problems. But you may have to wait for Emacs-25.1. This may happen earlier if you give us a hand, tho; -)