Use UTF-8 as default for IRC messages

[grawity]

It would be very nice if the default character set was "UTF-8 (Unicode)", instead of the current odd "Latin/Unicode hybrid".

When some messages are sent as UTF-8 but others as "Latin", it confuses users who have a different fallback charset (for example, "UTF-8 → ISO-8859-13") or no fallback configured (UTF-8 only).

It's not even mentioned which charset is used as the "Latin" part of said hybrid. Is it always ISO-8859-1 (aka "Latin-1") or CP1252 (the Windows version of Latin-1), or is it the charset shown under "Help → About" (which is different for every user)? If it's the latter, it makes things even worse.

Using the hybrid charset can also cause messages to be mis-decoded by other clients which try UTF-8 first. For example (although unlikely but possible), if the user sends ö, HexChat will encode it as "Latin" and send as 0xC3 0xB6 – which is in fact a valid UTF-8 sequence that other clients will decode as ö.

Just the one misfeature in an otherwise cool client.