[emacs-bidi] Re: Getting started with Emacs BiDi

[Ze'ev Clementson]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> From: Ze'ev Clementson <address@hidden>
>> Date: Mon, 05 Jul 2010 12:35:28 -0700
>> 
>> It took me a little while to figure out how to turn on bidi and use it
>> to input Hebrew in Emacs 24. It wasn't hard to figure it out, but it did
>> require some investigative work.
>
> Did you find anything that is not already in the manual?

Which manual? The emacs info files don't appear to have anything
bidi-related in them (at least a search for "bidi" didn't turn up any
hits). 

>
>>   (if bidi-display-reordering
>>        (progn
>>              (setq bidi-display-reordering nil)
>>              (inactivate-input-method))
>>      (setq bidi-display-reordering t)
>
> There's no need to turn bidi-display-reordering on and off.  You can
> turn it on by default and leave it that way.  Typing plain L2R Latin
> text should look the same with bidi-display-reordering non-nil as it
> was before Emacs 24 (barring bugs).  I know a few people who actually
> run Emacs 24 like that, even though they don't read any bidi script,
> and I've heard no complaints from them for quite some time, so doing
> that should be pretty safe.

Oh, that's easy than. I thought there was some reason for not having it
on by default. If so, why isn't bidi-display-reordering defaulted to t
in the emacs24 code? I assume it will be turned on by default when
emacs24 is released?

>>      (if arg
>>              (setq bidi-paragraph-direction 'right-to-left)
>>        (setq bidi-paragraph-direction nil))
>
> Likewise, toggling bidi-paragraph-direction doesn't make much sense,
> IMO.  This is a per-buffer variable, so once you've set it to R2L,
> presumably because the buffer should display mostly R2L text, it
> should stay that way.  It's not like this variable has effect only on
> the current paragraph.  And in another buffer, the value will be
> unaffected by any changes in other buffers.

That makes sense now that you spell it out too. Looking at the
docstrings for bidi-display-reordering and bidi-paragraph-direction, I
had assumed a hierarchical relationship; however, I see that (once
bidi-display-reordering is set to t by default) they will probably
only be changed as an exceptional case.

>> Does anyone else have any elisp snippets that they've found useful
>> when working with bidi and/or hebrew? 
>
> I basically just use "C-\" to switch into the Hebrew input method, and
> that's all.
>
> What else is missing that you'd like a snippet for?

I wasn't actually missing anything. However, I tend to write little
snippets of elisp code that help my workflow and I was wondering whether
others who had used bidi for a while might have accumulated a few. For
example, I noticed that Yair has added Tiro and SIL and Yiddish input
methods
(http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-bidi/2010-05/msg00025.html). This
struck a chord with me as I recently created some Hebrew bookmarklets
for Tiro, SIL, Hebrew-QWERTY, and my own Hebew-ZC keyboard layouts
(http://bc.tech.coop/DavidKeyboard.html) and will probably add the
latter keyboard layout to my own .emacs file. Since I haven't been doing
any Hebrew stuff in emacs, I was curious as to whether others had their
own snippets that they would like to share.   

- Ze'ev