2 ms·

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

• hollerith 3y ago
  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.
  • anthk 3y ago
    TBH Gvim and most editors did the same on saving prompts, but for sure you could edit that under Emacs with M-x configure, and Emacs supported weirdly encoded files on the spot.