Bidi paragraph direction in terminal emulators

[Eli Zaretskii via Unicode]

> Date: Fri, 8 Feb 2019 21:55:58 +0000
> From: Richard Wordingham via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org>
> 
> > > What's the sledgehammer for Windows?  
> 
> > Not sure what you meant.  "M-x term" doesn't work on Windows.
> 
> So my question is, 'What do I use on Windows?'  The application may be
> disproportionate to the function I use it for.

Try "M-x shell".  Most of "M-x term" is not needed on Windows anyway,
because the Windows console doesn't support SGR escapes and other
curses-like functionalities, at least not yet.

> I will give a concrete application.  If I want to make a font that is
> interpretable for Tai Tham and maximally usable with VTE, what are the
> VTE-specific constraints for me to be able to use it for Tai Tham when
> using basic text utilities?  For example, if VTE decides that for
> <cons, left-matra, above-matra> as two clusters <cons> and <left-matra,
> above-matra>, can I nevertheless position the above-matra above the
> <cons>?

For character composition, you must have a shaping engine to talk to,
and the shaper should tell you the width of each grapheme cluster it
returns.  I don't see how you can expect wcwidth, or any other
interface that was designed to work with _characters_, to be useful
when you need to display grapheme clusters.