I can’t stand it when I’m banging out a CSV by hand and have to manually escape the field and record separators. Happens all the time.

I use TSV for that reason. Most of the time you don't need to escape anything. And from code you need to escape/unescape only 4 chars. \t \n \NULL and \\.

In a terminal, Record Separator is CTRL-^, Unit Separator is CTRL-_. Vi[m] will accept the former literally, and will accept the latter if escaped with a CTRL-V.