To avoid repeating the same discussion, I've written detailed proposals for
backslash and tilde. Personnally, I'd prefer backslashes to avoid using an
additional ASCII character (they become precious), but tildes would be fine
by me too. I expect that changing the current linebreak markup won't be
welcome by everyone, but I think alternatives if backslash is the escape
character are much worse.

-- [[YvesPiguet]], 2007-Mar-08

For nonbreaking spaces, which are somewhat related, I'd suggest to use
naked single underscores. Double underscores would be reserved for engines
which support underline.

-- [[YvesPiguet]], 2007-Mar-08

I removed the following line from the decision:

* //Consequence:// the current linebreak as of Creole 0.5 (double backslash) is removed from Creole.

The current linebreak would stay and uses could just type a backslash followed by a space or alphanumeric character to get a linebreak.

-- [[ChuckSmith]], 2007-Mar-13

Then I ask here to consider as a request what I called a consequence.
If backslash becomes the escape character, double backslash should
be an escaped backslash, for two reasons: it wouldn't be an exception,
and with your proposition, it would be impossible to write
backslash + dot + alphanum.

Of course, the discussion is moot if we eventually choose the tilde.

-- [[YvesPiguet]], 2007-Mar-13

Will we see an apropriate proposal page soon?

If there is no agreement, we could have several proposal pages, maybe, as long as they are properly described, explained and discussed.

For me, at least, it's still not just "Which character do we use for escaping?" but also "Do we need an escape character at all?" and "What's wrong with using nowiki or insering an empty {{{{{{~}}}}}}?".

-- [[Radomir Dopieralski]], 2007-Mar-08

For me, the most aggravating part is that ~ stands for the home directory in many shells as used on Unix, GNU/Linux and Mac OSX systems. Example: ~/.emacs is a file in my home directory. On a site that documents software, this is aggravating, because ~/bin and /bin are not the same thing at all. Using ~ will make this a common typo, however.

I'd prefer not specifying an escape character at all.

-- AlexSchroeder

If you implement your parser according to the EscapeCharacterProposal, it //only escapes in certain combinations//. 

{{{
~/ -> this does not escape anything
~= -> this escapes heading syntax
}}}

see [[EscapeCharacterProposal#Scope of Escape Character]]

--[[Christoph Sauer]], 2007-April-04

Hm, then we need to rewrite that proposal, because now it reads: "This way, stars, slashes and other markup characters, when found in the original text, can be easily escaped, to be rendered as themselves. The special escape character, when put before alpha-numeric characters, could be rendered as itself (no escape)." As far as I can tell, the slash is used for italics, and therefore belongs into the "other markup characters" category. At the same time, the slash is clearly not in the "alpha-numeric" exception...

-- AlexSchroeder