base65536

Since they naively count unicode characters, https://github.com/qntm/base65536 is the best data encoding mechanism. You can fit 15 bits per character, or a total of 510 bytes per key and value.

One of my toy projects: https://github.com/thanatos/baseunicode ; there's probably a lot that could be done better, and the alphabet it uses needs to be greatly expanded. There are few other implementations of the same idea out there, too. Here's another one: https://github.com/qntm/base65536 ; since it uses a power-of-two sized alphabet, it avoids some of the work mine has to do around partial output bytes. That link also links to some other ideas & implementations The exact metric I cared about at the time was compressing for screen-space, not for actual byte-for-byte space. I wrote it after spending some time in a situation where doing a proper scp was just a PITA, unfortunately, but copy/pasting into a terminal is almost always a thing that works. But I was also dealing with screen/tmux, which makes scrolling difficult, so I wanted th