Yeah and good luck if your native language requires CJK characters, right-to-left scripts like Arabic, or whatever. Fortunately Unicode is fairly good nowadays but the olden days of the wild west of encoding was terrible.
And if you're already assuming unicode (which all these "plaintext" tools do), why aren't we just using unicode bullet points instead of dashes and *? Why not just use unicode bold and italics instead of *hacks*?
It is a question of the input method first and, as the sibling commenter said, grepping second. Fuzzy search could handle "-" as: "–", "—", "―", "‒" and other dashes. I input slightly more special characters on my phone as it is easier. On my computer I remember how I can easily write ° (on Linux and ChromeOS - Shift-AltGr-0) so I use it more. I don't know how to easily input a bullet point and I am too lazy to open a character table app every time it is needed.
In a way it is the same with programming languages. I think there are now programming languages supporting unicode operators for example, like =, ≠, ∧, ∨, ∩, ∪. But they suffer from the same problem. How to input them, how to search for them?
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Yeah and good luck if your native language requires CJK characters, right-to-left scripts like Arabic, or whatever. Fortunately Unicode is fairly good nowadays but the olden days of the wild west of encoding was terrible.
And if you're already assuming unicode (which all these "plaintext" tools do), why aren't we just using unicode bullet points instead of dashes and *? Why not just use unicode bold and italics instead of *hacks*?
It is a question of the input method first and, as the sibling commenter said, grepping second. Fuzzy search could handle "-" as: "–", "—", "―", "‒" and other dashes. I input slightly more special characters on my phone as it is easier. On my computer I remember how I can easily write ° (on Linux and ChromeOS - Shift-AltGr-0) so I use it more. I don't know how to easily input a bullet point and I am too lazy to open a character table app every time it is needed.
In a way it is the same with programming languages. I think there are now programming languages supporting unicode operators for example, like =, ≠, ∧, ∨, ∩, ∪. But they suffer from the same problem. How to input them, how to search for them?
To be able to search and grep?
I welcome you to the world of printers, specially industrial label printers when using their (fast) bitmap fonts instead of e.g. true type ones.