Teaching emacs to copy utf-8 on Mac OS X

Mac OS X comes with a command line tool for maniplating the clipboard called pbcopy. It's usage is simple: you throw stuff in it's stdin and that stuff is copied to the clipboard. This way we can teach emacs to copy stuff to the clipboard with this function

(defun paste-to-osx (text &optional push)
  (let ((process-connection-type nil)
        (default-directory "~"))
    (let ((proc (start-process "pbcopy" "*Messages*" "pbcopy")))
      (process-send-string proc text)
      (process-send-eof proc))))


(setq interprogram-cut-function 'paste-to-osx)

And this will work pretty well for englshIf you. It will however fail in other languages. For example copying the string λογος, αιμα, νοημα from an emacs buffer will paste as random unicode characeters.

Setting the LANG env var fixes the problem.

(defun paste-to-osx (text &optional push)
  (let ((process-connection-type nil)
        (lang (getenv "LANG"))
        (default-directory "~"))
    (setenv "LANG" "en_US.UTF-8")
    (let ((proc (start-process "pbcopy" "*Messages*" "pbcopy")))
      (process-send-string proc text)
      (process-send-eof proc))
    (setenv "LANG" lang)))

Teaching emacs to copy utf-8 on Mac OS X

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