Counting Devanagari Aksharas

[Richard Wordingham via Unicode]

On Sat, 22 Apr 2017 13:34:32 +0300
Eli Zaretskii via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:

> AFAIR, Emacs allows one to _delete_ individual characters,
> i.e. Backspace and C-d delete character-by-character, so the problem
> shouldn't be so grave for imperfect typists.

Deleting forwards by one _character_ certainly makes life less harsh.
It's pleasanter than the UAX#29 suggestion, "For example, on a given
system the backspace key might delete by code point, while the delete
key may delete an entire cluster".

> Movement by grapheme
> cluster is AFAIK the most natural way of moving in complex scripts.

Evidence?  It's easiest for displaying the cursor.  I've encountered the
problem that, while at least I can search for text smaller than a
cluster, there's no indication in the window of where in the window the
text is.  SIL's Graphite supports the idea of a split cursor, which
shows the glyphs corresponding to the characters before and after the
cursor position.

Richard.