I looked into the settings now and it seems that only the width and height options are possible.

However, the question still stands. Is it possible to show characters and now html entities some other way?

There are some of the reserved symbols that must be converted into their html representation. If you see, when I added these symbols

!@#$%^&*()

These were converted into following (while viewing in source code).

<p>^{!@#$%^&amp;*()}</p>

You can refer this article for more information related to it

https://www.tutorialrepublic.com/html-tutorial/html-entities.php

Thanks

But is there a configuration to show html entities as their actual characters while viewing source code? In the project I am working on there used to be no html entities in source code view. But after upgrading from EPi 10 to EPi 11 the source code view starting displaying html entites instead

You can use configuration option "entity_encoding"

tinyMCE.init({    

...    

entity_encoding : "raw"

});