Proposal for BiDi in terminal emulators

[Egmont Koblinger via Unicode]

Hi Eli,

On Wed, Jan 30, 2019 at 5:10 PM Eli Zaretskii <eliz at gnu.org> wrote:

> I think the application could use TAB characters to get to the next
> cell, then simplistic reordering would also work.

TAB handling is extremely complicated, because in terminal emulation
TAB is not a character, TAB is a control instruction (like escape
sequences) that moves the cursor (and jumps through the existing
content, if any, without erasing it). Some terminal emulators perform
some magic to remember TABs in certain circumstances, but they cannot
always do so.

There are plenty of other problems, e.g. how they are handled at the
end of line (no, they don't wrap to the next line), how their
positions are user-configurable and not necessarily at every 8th
column etc., I'm not going into these details now if you don't mind,
it's just not a feasible approach.

cheers,
egmont