knime.ini Unicode Option

Can the KNIME developers make the Unicode option [-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8] standard in the knime.ini file? Or can my old options be automatically copied across to the new knime.ini file during installation?

Having the KNIME installation automatically take care of the memory handling options [-Xmx8129m] and [-XX:MaxPermSize=1024m] has been a great addition and has removed a lot of confusion. But, for me, it's had the unfortunate side effect that I now rarely look at the knime.ini file. So today after I upgraded to KNIME 3.1.2 it took me about 6 hours of head-scratching before I remembered that I had to also set the Unicode option.

What's the downside of automatically setting Unicode? Can KNIME copy my old settings to my new knime.ini file? Or maybe the installation can provide a list of common settings and ask the user which settings they want?

 

There should never be the need to explicitly set the encoding in the knime.ini. Why do you need this setting?