Hahah, I came here to make the comment about ASCII's control characters, so I'm glad someone else beat me to it, and also that someone further pointed out that this topic comes up every time someone mentions CSV!
>we just need some major text editor to get the ball rolling and start making some attempts to understand these characters
Many text editors offer extensions APIs, including Vim, Emacs, Notepad++. But the ideal behavior would be to auto-align record separators and treat unit separators as a special kind of newline. That would allow the file to actually look like a table within the text editor. Input record separator as shift+space and unit separator as shift+enter.
Re:A love letter to the CSV format
by hermitcrab on Wednesday March 26, 2025 @06:15PM
(#43488064)
I think it would be enough for:
1. the field separator to be shown as a special character
2. the row separator to be (optionally) be interpreted as a linefeed
IIRC 1) is true for Notepad++, but not 2).
comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26305052
comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39679662
"ASCII Delimited Text – Not CSV or Tab Delimited Text" post [2014]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7474600
same post [2024]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42100499
comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15440801
(...and many more.) "This comes up every single time someone mentions CSV. Without fail." - top reply from burntsushi in that last link, and it remains as true today as in 2017 :D
You're not wrong though, we just need some major text editor to get the ball rolling and start making some attempts to understand these characters, and the rest will follow suit. We're kinda stuck at a local optimum which is clearly not ideal but also not troublesome enough to easily drum up wide support for ADSV (ASCII Delimiter Separated Values).