Curio: MS PowerToys SMP remaps crash DW

Question

I'm normally running inView🞃 Split… ✓Code-Live
I've used MS PowerToys Keyboard Manager feature to remap the F1-F12 keys to various Unicode characters (and one string) frequently employed.
Some of these are Unicode BMP characters (U+0000 to U+FFFF) range, such as:⇩ U+21E9 DOWNWARDS WHITE ARROWThese work everywhere I've used them.
About half of them, however, are from the Unicode SMP range (U+10000 and up), such as:&#128270; U+1F50E RIGHT-POINTING MAGNIFYING GLASSThese work in all other apps, but can crash DW, when:☐ entered via the remapped Fₙ keypress☐ but only in the DW Code View window.
When typed into Code View, DW freezes, thinks about it for several seconds, and then crashes, throwing a Sorry, an error occurred dialog. I can repeat this reliably via New HTML document, where merely trying to type:‹p›🔎‹/p›in the ‹Body› content.
The Error report details curiously includes:‹crash exception="EXCEPTION_UNKNOWN" exceptionCode="0xe06d7363" instruction="0x00007FF95D1E782A"›
SMP otherwise works in DW. There is no crash when:◊ typed into DW Live View window via that same Fₙ key&#129300; &#x1F914;◊ pasted into Code View from elsewhere (including from the Live View window)◊ entered as Entity markup &#x1f50e; or &#128270;
I have no solid guesses as to what's happening. Is PowerToys sending UTF-16, UTF-32 or even UCS-2, into an app expecting ‹meta charset="utf-8"›?
So I'm not sure this is Adobe's problem. But if you encounter it, the work-arounds are above. And if you can't replicate it, that would be interesting. In actual working documents, a fair amount of work can be lost, not present in any recovery file DW has created. So save early & often.
Tech Notes:Windows 11 Pro 24H2 26100.7462Dreamweaver 21.7Angle brackets above are ‹ (&lsaquo) and › (&rsaquo;) to prevent re-interpretation by the site engine (as happened with some of the Unicode above—with any luck, the new forum engine won't be as destructive).

L e n a · Answer

What you’re running into looks more like a limitation of Dreamweaver’s Code View than an issue with Unicode or with PowerToys.

Code View is based on fairly old editor components, and they don’t always handle newer characters very gracefully. That would explain why everything works in Live View, when pasting, or when using entities, but can crash when certain characters are typed directly in Code View. Since the same input works fine in other applications, PowerToys is probably not doing anything wrong here. It’s simply exposing a fragile spot in Dreamweaver’s code editor.

This also isn’t really about whether one should use Unicode characters, SVG icons, or icon fonts. Those are design choices. The core issue is that Code View can still crash on perfectly valid input. Your workarounds are therefore sensible: pasting, entities, or entering the characters via Live View are the safest options. Thanks for the tip.

As a practical alternative, this can also be a good case for using an external editor for code editing. Dreamweaver works quite well when paired with some tool like Visual Studio Code for writing code, while still handling site management, preview, and Live View.

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