[samatman]

> nobody is using them for some other purpose.

There's a lot of tooling which uses them for their intended purpose, which is to represent the C0 control characters in a font, so they can be printed when they appear in a document. Your editor is probably one of those.

Which is why I consider USV a terrible idea. If I see ␇ in a file, I don't want to be constantly wondering if it's "mention ␇" or "use ␇ to represent \x07". That's why the control pictures block exists: to provide pictographs of invisible control characters. Not to make a cutesy hack "look! it's a picture of a control character pretending to be what it isn't!!" format.

[ykonstant]

I agree about USV, it creates confusion where none needs to exist. For personal use, though, it is not that bad to receive a USV: it should be postmarked ".usv" and in any case if you suspect shenanigans you can `grep` for the offending (literally!) unicode characters and `tr` them into proper ASCII separators. Now, if there is nesting in the USV, I give up.

I share the lament: the whole table issue was solved before it became a problem. POSIX divides ASCII into portable and non-portable characters; only portable characters are allowed in the fields and separators are non-portable. If you need nesting, use a portable encoding of the inner table. This scheme repeats indefinitely without escaping hell or exceptions, preventing tons of errors and headache.

Visibility is such a bizarre complaint. Text editors already handle control characters: they handle tabs, they handle newlines, it is not a tremendous, earth-shattering feature request to make them handle separators gracefully.

[rightbyte]

I don't underatand why this is a question up for debate. You need eye tracking, so that there is a beep when you read the relevant part.