The information density of Balsa strings makes them attractive for several applications. In memory-constrained environments such as those found on handheld devices and networks, many more Balsa strings can be present than alternative encodings. In-memory structure search over large collections becomes feasible. Because a string often fits within one line on a terminal, Balsa can be used for data entry in manual interactive shells such as a real-eval-print loops (REPLs) or notebooks.