I've seen the following in some init files,
(set-charset-priority 'unicode)
but after reading the documentation, I can't really say I understand the implications of this. In general I'm inclined to go Unicode and UTF-8 all the way, this being 2017, but would setting unicode as the highest priority charset have performance implications?
I know that a charset is distinct from an encoding scheme (e.g. UTF-8), but I don't think I understand Emac's handling of charsets well enough to understand the effect this setting has.
Currently, running charset-priority-list
in my current Emacs returns a list of 170 charsets, beginning with:
(ascii
iso-8859-1
unicode
latin-iso8859-1
...