emacs 21 (text) and special characters, i.e umlaute (solved)

Hi,

Just spent some time to solve this problem:

With the Emacs editor (text-mode) I wasn't able to enter German Umlaute (the a, o or us with the two dots on top) despite German language setting. The reason is, character encoding is off by default. How to switch it on?

My first solution was definitely not the most elegant:

C-x RET k at the prompt enter iso-8859-15-unix and
C-x RET t at the prompt enter iso-8859-15-unix

or the same in not-so-cryptic description:

(F10) - (o)ptions - (m)ule - (c)oding system - (k)eyboard - iso-8859-15-unix and
(F10) - (o)ptions - (m)ule - (c)oding system - (t)erminal - iso-8859-15-unix

Two days later its simply:
in .emacs file put one line "(set-keyboard-coding-system 'iso-latin-9)"

I hope this is useful

Lutz Weber