Re: Disambiguate modeline character for UTF-8?

[Ulrich Mueller]

>>>>> On Thu, 06 Jul 2023, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> > Sorry, I'm not interested in such radical changes.  UTF-8 is an
>> > important encoding, but that doesn't justify what you propose.  In the
>> > absolute majority of cases, "U" already means UTF-8 and nothing else,
>> > so the issue is marginal at best, and making such significant
>> > incompatible changes in user-facing displays is unjustified from my
>> > POV.
>> 
>> Sorry, but in what world does this qualify as a "radical change"?

> In this one.  People have been staring at "U" (and "UUU" on TTY
> frames) since Emacs 23.1 was released.  If someone cares about those
> characters so much so that they want them changed, please think about
> others who care about them and would be surprised and probably worried
> by suddenly seeing a different character.  (If the assumption is that
> people don't care about these indications, then this whole discussion
> is moot to begin with.)

Well, in the absolute majority of cases (UTF-8) the "U" would stay.

I'd rather expect users to be surprised when they see the "U" but then
find out that the encoding is something entirely different.

>> I propose changing UTF-16 and UTF-7 from uppercase "U" to lowercase "u",
>> and koi8 to some other character like "K".

> Yes, I understand the proposal.

How about the following then?

- Keep "U" for both UTF-8 and UTF-16.
- Change UTF-7 to "u" (which is already used for one of its variants).
- Change koi8 to "K".