Re: user sees \xxx but is thwarted from searching for them

[Richard Stallman]

    I was in such a situation yesterday. Normally I use latin-1 encoding but
    switched to language environment latin-9 to edit some files containing Euro
    signs and forgot about this change. Then I loaded a 400 line DOS file
    containing "-*- coding: cp850 -*-" in the first line. Emacs encoded all the
    umlauts already in the file as latin-1 but encoded the typed umlauts as
    latin-9. And after minor changes all over the file and a few interruptions
    I didn't remember which parts were changed and which were old ...

Does anyone have an idea for what we should do about this?
Does the change to turn on unify-on-encoding fix this automatically?

Will the switch to native Unicode fix it?