Idea: allow some weird Unicode operators like Julia does. Then it’ll be clear the weird operator is doing something weird and new. And this already works in other languages. There are lots of Unicode
Writing greek symbols is sufficiently annoying that I always kind of resent code that does this. It’s not just about the first time you are writing code, but also when you are reviewing it, or trying to share a snippet with a coworker, or lots more scenarios. Maybe it’s just me, but writing ‘z = x ∇ d’ is really tedious.
∇ is near-worst-case since it's not even Greek. I think domain-specific keyboard layouts are as much of a good idea as language-specific layouts, but they're a nuisance to install on *nix (trivial on OS X). Using .XCompose is the most practical *nix approach, in the absence of program-specific methods like Julia's tab-completable backslash names.
I interpret this as meaning that ibus is difficult to set up. FWIW, Emacs and Kitty let you input unicode without it.
Just use C-x 8 in Emacs and you'll get any symbol by name, with autocomplete.