>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.