Hacker News Reader

Comment by thebelal | Hacker News Reader

You can type them in console and vim with

    File separator - C-v C-\
    Group separator - C-v C-5
    Record separator - C-v C-6
    Unit separator - C-v C-7

They are all visible characters in both vim and emacs by default.

You can see them on the terminal with `cat -v`

It would be nice if more tools were built to take advantage of these characters, but there are some that do.

In Emacs, one way to enter these characters is to use `M-x ucs-insert` and then enter the hex code of the separator:

    M-x ucs-insert 1c
    M-x ucs-insert 1d
    M-x ucs-insert 1e
    M-x ucs-insert 1f

for file, group, record, and unit separators. Is there an easier way?

C-q (quoted-insert) will insert the next input character ignoring any other bindings. So: C-q C-\ C-q C-] C-q C-^ C-q C-_