Proposal for BiDi in terminal emulators

[Egmont Koblinger via Unicode]

On Thu, Jan 31, 2019 at 10:05 AM Richard Wordingham via Unicode
<unicode at unicode.org> wrote:

> > How will "ls -l" possibly work?  This is an example of the "table"
> > layout you were already discussing.
>
> I think the answer is that it will use the same trickery as with a
> default setting for the --color argument.  Colour codes are emitted
> only when the output is a terminal.  Presumably the same would go for
> Bidi controls.

Exactly, that's what I have in mind in the long run. If coreutils
folks like the idea, "ls" could have a new option
--bidi=never/auto/always. With BiDi mode, it would enclose each of the
logical segments of strings that potentially contain RTL text
(filenames, dates etc.) separately inside an FSI...PDI block. That way
its output would look as desired (over the terminal's new default
"implicit" mode), since the terminal would take care of BiDi-ing each
FSI...PDI block.


cheers,
egmont