Eryk> I tried print(transurrogate(s)) from editor and it worked!, printing '🔫 🔪' (though not near as pretty as here in Firefox.

I have previously thought of scanning strings before inserting into Text widgets and converting astral chars to \U000nnnnn form, with a color tag to distinguish such displays from the literal ten chars.   This should work fine for read-only output to Shell but not easily in Editor.  On Windows, I would just use transurrogate instead, and that would also work for loading files into the editor.

I believe transurrogate could potentially solve pasting on Windows by intercepting <<Paste>> events.

Serhiy, are you aware of Eryk's astral char workaround for Windows?  Could it be incorporated into _tkinter, where a string's kind is accessible?