Harald Dunkel writes:
Is this a special xterm feature? "whois sensors.de" works much better
with -k8. Would you suggest to make -k8 the default?
In a perfect world, it would be unnecessary since you wouldn't have
anything written on your terminal that wasn't in the proper charset.
In the real world, where the average xterm user runs dozens if not
hundreds of tools which write unvalidated data to the terminal (on
stdout or stderr), and few if any tools that use 8-bit control
characters, -k8 as default would be a good idea.