@timbray here is a totally different idea to address this: there are programmer’s fonts like #FiraCode that use ligatures to render multi-character sequences as more readable glyphs, e.g. “<=“ as “≤” or “->” as an arrow.

Maybe such a font could also render runs of backslashes with an overlay for their count. I.e four backslashes would be shown as “\\⁴\\“, and eight would be shown as “\\\\⁸\\\\“ (in very crude approximation) #ProgrammersFonts #Ligatures #Backslashes #FontDesign