Proposal for BiDi in terminal emulators

[Adam Borowski via Unicode]

On Tue, Jan 29, 2019 at 01:50:31PM +0100, Egmont Koblinger via Unicode wrote:
> Terminal emulators are a powerful tool used by many people for various
> tasks. Most terminal emulators' bugtracker has a request to add RTL /
> BiDi support.
[...]
> Some terminal emulators decided to run the BiDi algorithm for display
> purposes on its lines (rather than paragraphs, uh)

Even a line is way too big a piece to be safely reordered by the terminal.
What you propose will break every full-screen program that uses line-drawing
characters:

╒═══════════╤══════╕
│ filename1 │  123 │
│ FILENAME2 │   17 │
└───────────┴──────┘

would become:

╒═══════════╤══════╕
│ filename1 │  123 │
│ 17   │ 2EMANELIF │
└───────────┴──────┘

You can't even use character properties, because:

+===========+======+
| filename1 |  123 |
| FILENAME2 |   17 |
+-----------+------+

or even, probably more popular:

  filename1    123
  FILENAME2     17

I'm afraid there's no good way to do BiDi without support from individual
programs.


Meow!
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