I dont quite understand how you would need to manually switch to Unicode instead of the change happening automatically if the input is Unicode (or even Inkscape being Unicode by default). You dont mean switching to a differnt Input Method (Cyrillic/Asian Languages/etc) do you?
No. If you can type your non-ascii chars direct from keyboard, that's fine, it will work. But if you cannnot, use the Unicode mode to type the codes of the characters you need. Usually it's used for special typographic chars such as em-dash.
It might be a problem if you later want to allow Underlined text which normally uses Ctrl+U in text mode.
Yes. When we get there we'll think of something :)
Back to the general Inkscape interface, I should also mention that many users are familiar with Mozilla using Ctrl+U for View Source, so it might be an improvement to bind Ctrl+U to the XML editor, so it might still be worth changing ungroup to ctrl+shift+g
Again, no need to change. Ctrl+Shift+G works for ungrouping already.
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