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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

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Is there a text editor/notes app that adds Unicode symbols? (feddit.de)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by MonkderDritte@feddit.de to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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For example, there is Material Notes which has a editor toolbar with bold, indented, ~~stroke~~, etc. But this is rendered, exported to json or syntax like Markdown. This app too, in which i write this on lemmy, does the same. We have ☐, ☒, •, ‣ in Unicode, 𝗕𝗼𝗹𝗱, 𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡, s̵t̵r̵o̵k̵e̵, so why not use this?

Basically, what i'm looking for is a text editor with toolbar/keystrokes for Android or Linux, which adds unicode symbols for rich text. It would make reading plain text notes/todo lists cross-device simpler. Yes, there's UnicodePad and Charmap but that's not the same.

edit: something where you mark a word, tap the B in the toolbar or press ctrl+b and it replaces the characters with uc bold characters, no? Tap the list button and it adds uc bullet points, etc...

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[–] leopold@lemmy.kde.social 3 points 5 months ago

Because it's not actually a good idea.

You create text that is basically impossible to search. Like, for instance, do a Ctrl+F on this page and search for "Bold". You'll see the example from OP doesn't get picked up, because it's not a B, it's a 𝗕. And it's not an o, it's an 𝗼. And so on. Or how about this? Go on Google and copy-paste this word from OP: "s̵t̵r̵o̵k̵e̵". Now, stroke isn't a particularly unusual word, but this thread is just about the only result Google returns. Because it's not stroke. It's s̵t̵r̵o̵k̵e̵.

It's also bad for accessibility. A lot of the time screen readers just won't know what to do with your bold or italic Unicode text.

And of course this only works for characters for which Unicode actually has these variants. Not a problem with the Latin alphabet, but what about Arabic? Cyrillic? Chinese? Devanagari? Hangul? Not gonna work.

These characters are from the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols code block. They're stylized Greek and Latin letters meant chiefly for use in mathematical contexts. The Unicode standard explicitly advises against using them to fake markup for the reasons outlined above and more. A simple markup language is just about always going to be preferable to faking it with Unicode.