I’m sure it’s crazy easy, but I can’t find it: how do I type special characters, in FontLab I could type /a.alt or /a.sc how does it work with Glyphs in text mode? Do I have to actually search for every character I can’t access directly?
Cmd-F
Or choose an OT feature in the Features popup in the bottom left corner.
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Would it make sense to have such alternates pop up as a menu when holding down the key, like the standard diacritics do?
You mean you hold down the A key and get a choice of a.ss01, a.alt, a.test, a.001 and so on?
I’m so accustomed to the FontLab way, that I find it kind of cumbersome 
The iOS-style pop up is ok, but you still can access too little characters from the keyboard, W and Z have no pop up for example, /Wacute /Wgrave /Wdieresis are not accessible.
I also like to test ligatures alongside the normal word, [back] [ba/c_k] and see what icons look like in a word. I usually give them silly names.
Probably not. Glyphs would have to be able to recognize whatever naming system users came up with, which would probably have to be dumbed down to holding a letter and seeing a list of everything that starts with said letter. At that point it's easier to just enter stuff into the cmf-F menu. But it might be nice to be able to input regular expressions in the cmd-F menu similar to the regular expression entry in the Glyphs 2 search bar.
and how should the popup handle glyphs from unrelated scripts? And symbols?
But that would require you to type the full name. Cmd-F only needs the first letters.
Also about alternates: why not insert the default glyph, e.g. /a, then fn-arrow (or Home/End on extended keyboards) through the alternates? Works great with Font Info > other settings > alternates next to base.
And sample text, where you can use names with slash.
I’ve always found the FLS way cumbersome because you always needed to pay attention to slashes and the names had to be completely accurate.