> Special Unicode Characters(tm) can't be typed by anyone on any keyboard and readable by noone.

While I'm not a fan of USV, I do believe it is type-able on both macOS and Linux¹. The IME's character picker in both OSes contains all of the necessary characters, I think. (I use "␤" in commit messages, occasionally. That was a typed ␤, not copy/pasted from a Google query or such.)

It would be quite tedious, I do admit; reasonably typed by someone, probably not.

I don't normally type out CSVs by hand either, though.

(¹I don't know about Windows as I simply haven't cared about it in years. For all I know, they've grown an IME in the intervening decade.)

Even if the csv isn’t being typed out by hand, when importing into Excel and the delimiter needs to be manually entered, because it isn’t one of the common ones Excel has a radio button for… it is nice to be able to easily type it.

While I can see a convenience argument for the somewhat contrived case of typing an entire file out by hand, entering the character once for the import does not seem like a great bar.

> it is nice to be able to easily type it.

Again, that's where an IME is helpful; on the OSes I mention, it's "␞" is:

  macOS: ⌘+^+Space, "record", <arrows to select>, Enter
  Linux: Super+e, "record", Space, Space, <arrows>, Enter

The process is highly visual on both, so you're getting feedback about whether you're about to hit the right character, or not.

(And like, if you have the file, you can always ^C ^V the character, if say you don't know how to IME, or you don't know what the name of the char is, etc.…)

Would it be possible to just type the file using commas, semicolons, or pipes or something (whatever you happen to know you don’t have in your file) and then convert them using sed?

Yes, it would be possible. You'd have to make sure the character didn't appear / no escaping at all was present, which the data may or may not allow.

Might as well just get a dedicated CSV→USV converter, though.

(I have a variant of this problem in JSON→YAML … usually I just shove one into the other & pray, akin to your sed solution.)

Any character within reason can certainly be entered by way of Character Map in Windows or its equivalent in Linux or MacOS, but if you're arguing that then you don't understand the crux of my argument: Convenience is a virtue.

There is value in the delimiter simply being a key on practically any keyboard in existence. Anything that involves something more complicated than just pushing a single button on a keyboard (this includes IMEs) is a non-starter, because convenience is a virtue.

The fact that it is a character on the keyboard is exactly the problem, too. Any character a user can easily enter will definitely end up mixed into your data somewhere.

> Anything that involves something more complicated than just pushing a single button on a keyboard (this includes IMEs)

My point is that this is merely a more stringent argument; it's now "on a keyboard, and cannot involve dead keys, etc." … which now excludes classic CSV, too, which requires two keys to enter a double quote. (Shift+')

Again, it does require more keys, and it is certainly not convenient, but n keys to me is still n keys. The real question is why one isn't using a proper tool to enter the data, and is instead encoding it by hand, which, again, even for a classic CSV, is basically something I've never done. (… because why would one?)

I can't remember the last time I, or anyone I've ever worked with for that matter, ever typed up a CSV from scratch. The whole point of USV is that the delimiters can't normally be typed so you don't have to worry about escaping.

USV supports displayable delimiters (see https://github.com/SixArm/usv), so for the much more common case of editing an existing CSV in a text editor, you can just copy and paste.

Everyone of us was a beginner at some point. The first time we came across CSV format we likely typed it in notepad by hand. A lot of issues with CSVs are also sometimes troubleshooted by hand-- by manually fixing a quote or a comma.

There is value is the ability to do this level of editing and troubleshooting.

> The first time we came across CSV format we likely typed it in notepad by hand.

Again, I'm not saying CSVs aren't edited by hand in a text editor, I'm saying they aren't created from scratch in a text editor, even by beginners. USVs are easy to edit in a text editor, too, and I tried viewing and editing USVs with a couple different fonts and had no problems.

If the separators can't easily be typed, how do you add a new cell?

Nobody can type up a GIF image, or Word document in a Notepad, yet files of both those formats exist. The answer obviously is tooling. If a format with sane separators was common, so would editors that could edit that format be.

I was responding to the GP's:

USVs are easy to edit in a text editor

I don't see how that's the case.

If a format with sane separators was common, so would editors that could edit that format be

Sure, but that's a hypothetical future editor, not something that currently exists.

Edit to add: I also disagree with "sane" in that context. New separators won't solve anything. You'll always need escaping/encoding/encapsulation; get that right and everything else follows. JSON is comma-separated and does just fine.

Copy and paste.

No we didn't, we likely typed in Excel by double clicking on our first csv

I can’t speak for everyone, but I definitely didn’t use Excel.

I've valued the virtue of CSVs being readable by any text editor known to man, and I've occasionally edited them by hand. The pure simplicity of reading and typing commas trumps any value provided by more esoteric configurations.

As for escaping, that's for the subsequent programmers (which could also be me) to figure out. If it is me, I'll deal with it because it keeps things simple.

> I've occasionally edited them by hand.

Yeah, usually when the quoting was f'up.