# Change priorities of text encodings in CotEditor on Mac

You can prioritize specific encodings to detect text encoding of documents.

To change the priority of encoding detection on file opening:

1. Choose CotEditor > Settings.
2. Select the Format pane.
3. In the “priority of encodings” section, click the Edit List button.
4. Move up the encodings you use frequently.
   (Here, we recommend placing UTF-16 after other often-used encodings, as UTF-16 can encode most characters.)

Though you can change the order of encodings, you cannot delete them. Just move down the encodings you don’t use.

Besides, “Unicode (UTF-8)” and “Unicode (UTF-8) with BOM” are always handled as a set. Because the BOM (byte order mark) is taken into account when trying to encode data into UTF-8, there is no effect on the detection precision that the order of these two encodings is fixed.

## See also

- Use four kinds of Shift JIS properly
- Change Format settings