I exercised once, but found that I was allergic to it. My skin flushed and
my heart raced. I got sweaty and short of breath. Very dangerous.

I hate encodings. I dont understand why not everybody just uses utf-8, at least for data exchange. I really like Textonly-Software, running in an Xterm, but as soon as run into trouble with encodings, it is almost impossible to use it.

I tried Finch, CenterIM and Irssi+Bitlbee which I liked most and did best with encoding-problems, but all of them are sort of convenient, when you got used to them. But all of them have problems when special characters are sent.

All of them have settings for encodings, but I always run into trouble with them when using different terminal emulators. Its not just a few characters appearing in a strange way, it can lead to disappearing parts of the UI and make the terminal emulator not respond anymore to keystrokes.

Maybe the right way of handling encoding shit is not to try to do it right, but to try to do it good enough to work with it. For example, I would mostly be satisfied when I could at least tell them to just display everything as quoted printable, so at least the UI wouldnt be disturbed. Any maybe have a mode to display single characters as ascii-art.