Re: Strange charset selection when posting in iso-8859-1

[Mark Hood <invalid@invalid.com>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
> >   (setq-default enable-multibyte-characters nil)
> 
> If you have problems that seem to be fixed by the above, please use
> M-x report-emacs-bug RET to report them.

Ever since Emacs 20 I have had the following lines in my .emacs:

(setq default-enable-multibyte-characters nil)
(set-language-environment "Latin-1")

Otherwise I was constantly fighting problems with coding systems.  

I often work directly with binary files, but even files I thought were
supposed to be plain unibyte text would often cause Emacs V20 and
later to ask me strange and confusing questions when reading and
writing them.  Much of the large library of Emacs lisp I had developed
for myself was broken due to multibyte issues.

Really, it was much easier to put those two lines in my .emacs then to
try to sort out all those issues in attempts to make reproducible and
understandable bug reports.  My usage of Emacs is always within the
context of European languages, so unibyte mode works very well for me.

I was stuck on Emacs 19.34 for years until I discovered that those two
lines reliably put Emacs V20 and later into unibyte mode.

-- Mark Hood