Re: Disambiguate modeline character for UTF-8?

[Juri Linkov]

>> but since I can't memorize these cryptic characters, I customized
>> the mode-line to display coding names in full, except a few characters
>> that I can remember: "U" for UTF-8, and "-" for ASCII:
>
> So on a TTY, you can have "UTF-8UTF-8UTF-8", if all the 3 encodings
> are UTF-8?  Or do you only handle buffer-file-coding-system and ignore
> the other 2 encodings?

Currently the other 2 encodings are ignored on a TTY, but since
often all 3 encodings are the same, then maybe it would be enough
to display the full name for buffer-file-coding-system,
and mnemonics for the other 2 encodings.

>> A long coding string in the mode-line also serves as a warning that
>> a non-standard coding is used in the buffer.
>
> It's okay to customize the mode line to your personal needs, but are
> you really proposing this for a general-purpose feature in Emacs?
> Because then we'd need to start by deciding what is "non-standard" in
> this context.  For example, assuming the "standard" encoding is the
> one determined by the locale, then if one lives in a non-UTF-8 locale,
> they will always see "non-standard" strings in each and every .el file
> they ever edit, which doesn't sound like a good idea to me.

A list of "standard" codings could be customizable, so every user
could add more codings to it after learning their mnemonic characters.