Re: How do I edit UTF-8 encoded files with Emacs?

[Jim MacBaine <jmacbaine@gmail.com>]

On 8/9/05, I wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> Short question: How do I edit UTF-8 encoded files with Emacs? Those
> files contains German quotation marks, Umlauts and other interesting
> things.
> [...]
> How do I tell emacs that the file I'm editing is utf-8-encoded?

What I have tried so far includes starting emacs out of a utf-8 xterm, setting 

(setq locale-coding-system 'utf-8)
(set-terminal-coding-system 'utf-8)
(set-keyboard-coding-system 'utf-8)
(prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)

in .emacs.  I also tried to prefix find-file with
universal-coding-system-argument
(C-x C-m c). No success so far: Emacs still displays all non-ascii
characters as two bytes. I have tried emacs in X mode as well as
inside the xterm ("emacs -nw").   My emacs is 21.4.1 from Debian
Sarge.

I'm quite stuck now. Vim works in the utf-8 xterm out of the box.
Maybe I should give up my emacs macros and consider to learn Vim...

Regards,
Jim