This made me recall a semi-recent convo about this and found this thread though it’s your thread 
If you’re not talking tests, you can pass the charlists: :as_lists) option to either dbg or IO.inspect:
iex(1)> IO.inspect(~c"hey there", charlists: :as_lists)
[104, 101, 121, 32, 116, 104, 101, 114, 101]
~c"hey there"
There is also this recent thread. TL;DR, if you want it IEx:
IEx.configure(inspect: [charlists: :as_lists])
Though there is a bunch of random interesting stuff in that thread.
