Re: Disambiguate modeline character for UTF-8?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Ulrich Mueller <ulm@gentoo.org>
> Cc: Ulrich Mueller <ulm@gentoo.org>,  emacs-devel@gnu.org,
>   drew.adams@oracle.com,  eggert@cs.ucla.edu,  monnier@iro.umontreal.ca
> Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2023 15:04:08 +0200
> 
> >>>>> On Wed, 05 Jul 2023, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> > The only real problem is between UTF-8 and UTF-16, since the others
> > are hardly ever used these days.  UTF-16 is also quite rarely used,
> > basically only on MS-Windows for system-level files.  So is this
> > really a problem that we need to solve, at the risk of breaking
> > people's "muscle" memory?  If I see the lower-case "u" on the
> > modeline when I expect to see "U" instead, I'd be surprised.  Is it
> > worth it?
> 
> UTF-8 is one of the most common encodings, and it is strange that it
> shares its modeline indicator with anything else. And the "U" is really
> ambiguous, because context won't help (or how would you decide if a
> buffer's file encoding is e.g. koi8-u or utf-8?).

Is the problem that koi8-u also uses 'U'?  That is, if we change
koi8-u to some other character, will that be good enough?

The other encodings are all from the UTF family, so using 'U' for them
all does make sense.  (The lower-case 'u' for utf-7 is IMO simply a
mistake, and can be fixed with a low risk, I think, since this
encoding is rare.)