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#76993
Init files and UTF-8
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Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> writes:
>> Is the above only true on some platforms?
>
> What matters is the locale's codeset, not the platform. Though it is
> true that most users of most platforms except Windows use UTF-8 these
> days, I know of at least some users of GNU/Linux who still set up
> their systems to use non-UTF-8 encoding.
Sure, I can see that some people will do that.
They will run into all kinds of fun, I'm sure, and not just in Emacs.
>> Should that be noted, or should it be moved to some platform
>> specific documentation?
>
> We could do that, but is that worth the hassle?
>
> . having a coding cookie can do no harm
> . having a coding cookie makes the init file portable and usable from
> several different systems with no subtle problems
The main hassle is not the coding cookie, but the complication of having
an entire section in the documentation. I was thinking that perhaps we
could spare our users that.
The portability argument is fair enough. Maybe this suggests that this
might no longer warrant a section in the manual and could be moved to
(for example) the MS-Windows FAQ, or something?
> . explaining when this could matter and when it couldn't is not
> simple and could confuse users who do not know enough about locales
> and encodings
>
>> Should the default be changed somehow, such that we always use UTF-8
>> when reading the init file?
>
> Why would we want to make such a breaking change, when all we suggest
> is to have a coding cookie, in a small minority of cases where init
> files bind non-ASCII keys?
Maybe this "small minority of cases" part could be clarified without
getting into the details. The section reads to me as if it's always a
problem, which seems misleading.
This bug report was last modified 95 days ago.
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