Guys, thank you for your enlightening explanation! I decided to give a try to xemacs-21.5.27. Overall I have more success, but I've encountered somewhat different problems. First and the least important: (key-mapping/info) Undefined Unicode key mappings. Your keyboard has, among many others, the following keysyms defined: U20B4 U0301 ... The first symbol is HRYVNIA SIGN (₴), a symbol for Ukrainian currency, this is a very very recent addition to Unicode so I don't complain much. The second one is COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT that I use as a stress sign for cyrillic (e.g. вимовля́ння).

Then, there is a different problem with EM DASH and EN DASH now: they seem to get entered, but a tilde is displayed instead of them and the following warning is produced: (font/notice) Unable to instantiate font for charset chinese-cns11643-1, face default

I use Terminus monospace font with unicode encoding and it definitely has these symbols. This is definitely not an input problem because copy/paste has the same result. Then, I still can not enter CYRILLIC CAPITAL/SMALL LETTER GHE WITH UPTURN, but there is no special warning now, maybe because of the following. Unusual thing with input is that when, e.g., I press AltGr+г to get "ґ", I instead get "u" (ascii latin small letter). By "AltGr" I mean ISO_Level3_Shift in X. Analogous thing happens for any other AltGr combination that results in a "problematic" symbol — AltGr is treated as if it was "Mode_switch". Now that I wrote it, I realize that most probably this is not a problem with XEmacs but rather a feature that is triggered by my hackery of XKB: $ xmodmap -pm | fgrep ISO_Level3_Shift mod5 Mode_switch (0x5d), ISO_Level3_Shift (0x75), ISO_Level3_Shift (0x7c) So, maybe XEmacs falls back to Mode_switch interpretation of Mod5 if it thinks that ISO_Level3_Shift is no good ? And by "no good" I mean that a key has 3rd/4th level and symbols on that level are not NULL(0), but they are not valid input for XEmacs. I must say that I haven't seen such a behavior from any other program. And I don't really have any key bound to Mode_switch (93 is a fake key code, it is never produced by a xfree86 keyboard driver).