PEP 686 – Make UTF-8 mode default

Default text file encoding being platform-dependent always drove me nuts. This is a welcome change.

I also appreciate that they did not attempt to tackle filesystem encoding here, which is a separate issue that drives me nuts, but separately.

Historically it made sense, when most software was local-only, and text files were expected to be in the local encoding. Not just platform-dependent, but user’s preferred locale-dependent. This is also how the C standard library operates.

For example, on Unix/Linux, using iso-8859-1 was common when using Western-European languages, and in Europe it became common to switch to iso-8859-15 after the Euro was introduced, because it contained the € symbol. UTF-8 only began to work flawlessly in the later aughts. Debian switched to it as the default with the Etch release in 2010.

Emacs was amazing for that; builtin text encoders/decoders/transcoders for everything.

My experience was that brittleness around text encoding in Emacs (versions 22 and 23 or so) was a constant source of annoyance for years.

IIRC, the main way this brittleness bit me was that every time a buffer containing a non-ASCII character was saved, Emacs would engage me in a conversation (which I found tedious and distracting) about what coding system I would like to use to save the file, and I never found a sane way to configure it to avoid such conversations even after spending hours learning about how Emacs does coding systems: I simply had to wait (a year or 3) for a new version of Emacs in which the code for saving buffers worked better.

I think some people like engaging in these conversations with their computers even though the conversations are very boring and repetitive and that such conversation-likers are numerous among Emacs users or at least Emacs maintainers.