On Sun, Oct 30, 2016 at 11:22 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:
In mentioning emoji, my main point was that "average computer users" are more and more likely to want to use emoji in general applications (emails, web applications, even documents) - and if a sufficiently general solution for that problem is found, it may provide a solution for the general character-entry case.
Before Unicode emoji were prevalent, ASCII emoticons dominated, and it's not uncommon for multi-character sequences to be automatically transformed into their corresponding emoji. It isn't hard to set something up that does these kinds of transformations for other Unicode characters - use trigraphs for clarity, and type "/:0" to produce "∅". Or whatever's comfortable for you. Maybe rig it on Ctrl-Alt-0, if you prefer shift-key sequences. ChrisA