made some changes to my keyboard layout including swapping D and H
wonder if i should swap T and G as well
yeah i am
now a QWEHDT keyboard
one of the questions of this keyboard design is what character i wanted to adopt for plain text emphasis and i decided on ✧
why not just use asterisks you may ask
well raised asterisks are used for footnotes and low asterisks are too small
i considered dotted cross ⁜, which i have used in the past, but font support is bad and it’s a pretty busy glyph
i considered ❇️ but it renders as an emoji these days, and can be quite busy when it doesn’t (as is ❈)
✧ is simple and conveys the sparkle without taking up too much space, and it’s easy to handwrite
for a bit i considered using # but # has a slightly different meaning i think
an outstanding question is whether i want to duplicate the star for single‐word emphasis like ✧this, or only for ✧multi‐word emphasis✧ (which is the convention i follow with † dagger as a proper name mark, and which i think makes more sense for nonpaired bracketing punctuation)
plus it’s impossible to use on any social media site