Hi guys,

I was wondering if someone can explain the rationale behind the utf-8-auto coding system that’s available in Emacs.

Is this something that will spare you from explicitly checking the underlying OS to determine whether you need to use utf-8-unix or some utf-8 variation for

windows (for instance)? 

I’m asking because its use was suggested on cider’s issue tracker (cider is a clojure programming environment for Emacs) (link https://github.com/bbatsov/ruby-style-guide/pull/338), but I couldn’t find any documentation about utf-8-auto and it seems that most Emacs extensions use utf-8-unix as their process coding systems. As I’m using only GNU/Linux and OS X I don’t have a problem with utf-8-unix, but Windows users obviously have. :-)