[jernfrost]

LuaTex which is displacing Latex is doing just that, increasingly using unicode directly. I’ve never used a plain editor on my Mac which DIDN’T handle unicode. In fact I use a plain text editor to write julia code whith unicode symbols. Anyway it is a tiny portion of the code and the Julia public API never force you to use unocode. You can always chose a non-unicode variant of the API.

Not using UTF8 in this day and age is just begging for problems.

At least on my mac you got OS wide tools for working with unicode.