Re: Displaying bytes (was: Inadequate documentation of silly

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 3:29 AM, Stefan Monnier
<monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
>>> If so, should we change the default priorities?
>> I'm not sure.  As it seems that windows-1252 is a superset of
>> iso-8859-1, it may be ok to give windows-1252 the higher priority.
>> How do iso-8859-1 users think?
>
> The problem with windows-1252 is that all files are valid in that
> coding-system.  So it's OK if there's a really high chance of
> encountering such files, but otherwise it leads to many misdetections.
>
>> For that, it seems that adding that facility in
>> after-insert-file-set-coding is good.   Here's a sample patch.  The
>> actual change should give more information to a user.
>
> Maybe we could try that.  But I really dislike adding a user-prompt in
> the middle of some operation that might be performed as part of
> something "unrelated".  And indeed the actual change may need to give
> a lot more information, mostly displaying the buffer without which the
> user cannot make a good guess.


Maybe it is better to read in the file in the buffer with a best guess
and add a hook that is run the first time the buffer is shown in a
window with some notification to the user of the problem?

Then of course also provide enough hints to make it as easy to change
coding system in that situation to the relevant alternatives.