1. If you are transporting a unicode string, reading/writing over the network or to a file, think in terms of UTF-8 bytes. Do not attempt to splice the string, treat it as an atomic unit.
2. If you are parsing a string, think in terms of code points (runes in Go, chars in Rust). A good example would be the Servo CSS parser. [1]
3. If you're comparing/searching/inspecting/sorting a string in code, segment by grapheme clusters and normalize, then do what you came to do. [2]
4. If you're displaying a string, think in terms of pixels. Do not attempt to limit a string by length in "characters" (nee grapheme clusters in the unicode world) but rather measure by what the renderer does with the string. Each character can be a thoroughly arbitrary width and height.
5. If you're building a WYSIWYG editor, there's more to it than I even know myself, but I suggest reading into what Xi did. It's going to be some combination of everything above. [3]
[1] https://github.com/servo/rust-cssparser/blob/master/src/toke...
If all your syntactically meaningful characters are in ASCII you can also use UTF-8 bytes in your parser.
Even if they aren't, no UTF-8 encoding of a character is a substring of the encoding of any other character(s).
I have nothing but respect and gratitude for people that write good unicode handling libraries, but even then the end developer has to learn a lot just to be aware of what to look out for when handling strings.
Somewhere on github I think, somebody has posted a file with evil Unicode strings.