Straightforward is completely subjective. But a comma is relatively much simpler in an absolute sense.
Ctrl+shift+6 is a 3-key chord, it’s potentially hard to discover (I can’t say I’ve actually ever seen it), it seems likely to be overridden by applications, and caret isn’t a natural separator and is more commonly used for other things, like exponents.
A comma is 1 key on the keyboard, and it’s already a natural separator; the very meaning of comma is separator. Note how many commas are used in this thread compared to the number of record separators. :P
Having to type both ctrl+shift+6 and ctrl+shift+minus a lot seems like a small physical and mental friction compared to using commas and returns each time a character is typed, that adds up to a lot of physical and mental friction over time. Enough that the eventual implication is that you need better tooling than a text editor provides in order to author delimited files, enough that it sort of undermines the idea of having a text file. It’s a mistake to think that because a key chord exists that it’s a solved problem, and a mistake to underestimate the value of making commonly used items as simple as possible, especially if it’s going to affect a lot of different people.
While I agree with the sentiment of that, it still seems a lot easier than escaping characters. I would probably opt for a mix. Control separation with new lines
Isn’t escaping a separate orthogonal issue? Or am I misunderstanding your point? Several people have pointed out that the special ascii field separator will have to be escaped if used within a field, just like a comma is. It seems like escaping is an issue either way, and aside from that, a comma is easier in practice than a special character at every level of interaction; discovery, typing, displaying, tooling, printing, standards, etc..?
I would concede that having the special characters inside fields will be less common than having commas inside CSV field is. I guess that is worth a lot even if it doesn’t fully solve the problem.
ctrl+_ to separate cells, ctrl+^ to separate rows - works perfectly in notepad++.
I think the proposal can be improved by using ctrl+^ followed by a newline as a row separator, it looks much more readable plus will allow various line-based CLI tools to be used unless there are newlines in the cells.
Ctrl+shift+6 is a 3-key chord, it’s potentially hard to discover (I can’t say I’ve actually ever seen it), it seems likely to be overridden by applications, and caret isn’t a natural separator and is more commonly used for other things, like exponents.
A comma is 1 key on the keyboard, and it’s already a natural separator; the very meaning of comma is separator. Note how many commas are used in this thread compared to the number of record separators. :P
Having to type both ctrl+shift+6 and ctrl+shift+minus a lot seems like a small physical and mental friction compared to using commas and returns each time a character is typed, that adds up to a lot of physical and mental friction over time. Enough that the eventual implication is that you need better tooling than a text editor provides in order to author delimited files, enough that it sort of undermines the idea of having a text file. It’s a mistake to think that because a key chord exists that it’s a solved problem, and a mistake to underestimate the value of making commonly used items as simple as possible, especially if it’s going to affect a lot of different people.