Nobody really needs to enter control characters anymore
Except those of us who use a terminal, who find control-C and control-Z (and, on FreeBSD, control-T) indispensable.
The closest thing to symlinks on *NIX systems
And, of course, I meant 'to shortcuts' there.
There are a few differences. First, symlinks are a property of the filesystem. This means that the normal filesystem APIs just work with them and you need special APIs for things that care about whether it's a link or not. In contrast, shortcuts are just another kind of file and everything that wants to follow them needs to know what the target is. Second, shortcuts contain a lot more information than just a path: they include the path to the destination file, an icon, the set of command-line arguments to pass, and some other flags. For example, I used to have a load of different shortcuts to the WinQuake (and, later, GLQuake) executable that all had different -game flags, for launching different mods. Many of them also had different icons, if the mod came with its own icon. You can't do that with symlinks.
The closest thing to symlinks on *NIX systems is
Roundabouts are no solution -- I've nearly been hit head-on multiple times in roundabouts because people go the wrong way.
Do you live somewhere with an unusually high concentration of stupid people?
Rather, I consider it pretty easy.
Is this really what Windows users consider easy? On a Mac, it depends on the keyboard layout, but for me it's alt-2. A cent symbol is alt-4 (dollar is shift-4). Entering a character with an accent is alt-something for the accent and then the letter that it goes on top of. For example, i-umlaut is option-u then i.
If memorising unicode character numbers is your idea of good HCI, then I really hope I never use a program that you've designed.
A list is only as strong as its weakest link. -- Don Knuth