Totally agree with this proposition! As there may be a character style for "no break" and "italic" and "underline" and even "color," would be so much easier to apply each as fit rather than having to pick which one to apply and which ones to have to format manually.

I agree this would be very useful in some circumstances.
However, Character styles are picked up by auto-generated TOCs whether you want it or not. GREP styles aren't. The GREP style can be triggered by an invisible non joiner character inserted in front of the word. With GREP styles you can apply several character styles to the same word, I haven't tested the limits of how many before you run into trouble… GREP styles are applied in the order they are listed under "GREP styles" in a paragraph style. (I found a lot of useful information on this at indesignsecrets)

Hey! Moderators! Are you blind? Kill all this spamer animals here in the comments

Just ran into a situation where I wanted a heading to have a character style that's picked up by a header and highlight it in yellow and found out it can't be both. Sigh. Agree this would be a great improvement.

Phantom, as I wrote in my feature request: There should be an »appearance« panel, as you have in Illustrator, which shows the hierarchy of the applied styles. The higher style wins.

Quite simple, actually. Have conflicts in character styles apply in order of application (e.g., if cs1 applies bold and cs2 applies semibold, bold will apply, given that cs1 is higher priority) and have a warning symbol appear when such conflicts exist, akin to overridden styles., with a contextual option to remove overridden styles.

I like this - but how do you prevent the application of conflicting Character Styles ?
For example - how do you prevent the user applying a CS for Condensed Bold and a CS for Extended Bold at the same time ?

While preparing a book for print it is also useful to have this feature when fine-tuning paragraph make-up. Just think of adding a CF for "no hyphenation" but the word already has "italics" applied.

Are there any workarounds that anyone knows of to achieve something like this?
I work in one brand all the time, so I'd love to set up shortcuts to apply a specific color, and another to apply a specific font without overriding the other, and without creating styles for each combination.

@Michael Gray - That was never the case...

After the last two updates, I am no longer able to apply multiple character styles.

Absolutely agree to Evan! Paragraph styles should work like CSS! In my eyes it is time for a new area of working with styles. Nothing changed here since the 1990s. The endless possibilities of CSS outstands this old model by far!

Absolutely need this!!! And I'll go further and say the same thing for paragraph styles. So tired of creating so many rigid, repetitive styles for things like [Body] [Body Indented] [Body Shaded] [Body Shaded + Indented]. Would be so much better to create simple global styles for commonly-used attributes like [Intented] [Shaded] and be able to ADD them to any other applied style. It should work exactly like CSS — we can have a paragraph with multiple classes applied, and whenever a conflict exists, the most-recently-applied style overrides the others.

So much this. Indesign can already apply multiple character styles, as you noted. So at least some of the feature exists.

Back in the late 1980s there was a program called Ready, Set, Go! that could do this. The implementation was powerful but clunky an unintuitive. Styles could include any feature, or leave any feature blank and there was no distinction between character and paragraph styles. This is much like how Character Styles work in InDesign, but not Paragraph Styles. In a Paragraph Style all attributes are included. But in RSG a style might include only the font. Another might include only leading. Another might include only point size. You body copy might be formatted with several styles. Changing leading globally could be done by just changing the Leading style. It was complicated, and I don’t think there was a way to make a composite style, so many styles would have to be applied where now you just use one style. I think it also didn’t handle conflicts well, so you really needed to plan things out.

I only played with it, since we already had PageMaker, FreeHand, and QuarkXPress and I didn’t need another program that nobody was using. I remember thinking it had potential, and InDesign’s Character Styles work similarly, in that they only apply what you want (just colour, just underlining, etc.).