Two ways: keyboard layout and editor support. Your OS keyboard layout, at least on Linux, can be customized to include any characters you type frequently. I ha

Two ways: keyboard layout and editor support. Your OS keyboard layout, at least on Linux, can be customized to include any characters you type frequently. I haven’t gone very deep down this rabbit–hole, but I have turned on some options that make nice quotation marks (“‘«»’”), em–dashes (“–”), ellipses (“…”) and a number of other characters (“²³½⅓¼≠±÷∞×” and so on) readily available with a compose key. I also put arrows on the numberpad, of course (“↙↓↘←↔→↖↑↗⇙⇓⇘⇐⇔⇒⇖⇑⇗”). Very useful for talking about menu items, like File → Save As (it has actually startled people when I can type things like that fluently in conversation). My editor of choice is Emacs, which has a built–in way to select characters by name. Typing `C-x 8 <RET>` prompts for a character name, with fuzzy searching and autocompletion. It also recently gained a similar facility for Emoji, which is more focused around the visual appearance. `C-x 8 e e` opens it. `C-x 8 e s` lets you search by name. Between your keyboard layout and your editor’s search capabilities and custom keybindings you can do anything.