Not only are special characters useful but some shells went to the other extreme. In the early days of the Mac, the system’s default keybindings made it so easy to type “weird” characters that the MPW Shell had many more special characters than shells on other platforms at the time, leading to creative uses of ƒ and ∂, etc.

Now that Unicode support is becoming more common, perhaps some bold shells will bravely adopt new special characters.