I tried to insert a special character ½, and found it difficult to locate. I use kcharselect (from kde) to find it. It has a search bar. Just type in the term 'half', and it's the first thing shown (on my machine).
My suggestion is add a searchbar to the insert special character. BTW, I can use kcharselect to locate a unicode character. But, I don't think it would generally work to just paste in a unicode character to a LaTeX document, correct?
