Re: support for RTL text directly in the terminal?

[Benno Schulenberg]

Op 12-02-2020 om 02:31 schreef Mahyar Abbaspour:
> On Tue, Feb 11, 2020 at 7:24 PM Benno Schulenberg <address@hidden
> <mailto:address@hidden>> wrote:
>     My question is: is this usable?  I mean: can one comfortably edit an RTL
>     text using nano on mlterm?  Or is it awkward, confusing, troublesome?
> 
> Thanks for reviving this topic. To be honest, I don't use mlterm. I have 
> tried it
> a few times during the past few years but in every try, I was unable to get 
> any
> decent RTL output from it.

Sorry to hear that.  I had hoped it would work reasonably well, well enough
that one would be able to say that there's no need to build RTL support into
nano.  Alas...

Meanwhile I've played a bit more with nano and RTL on mlterm, and indeed,
it has problems.  For example, when I open two files, one with a Hebrew
name and another with a Latin name (I use Hebrew because I can recognize
some of its letters, so it's easier for me to see whether they are in the
proper order), then for the Hebrew one all three elements in the title bar
get swapped around: [1/2] is on the right side, and when I type something,
"Modified" is on the left.  That's quite funny.  When I then switch to the
other buffer, <Esc> followed by ">", then M2/2] appears on the left -- the
"[" is missing and the "M" of "Modified" doesn't get overwritten.  When I
switch some more between the buffers, at some point both names are in the
title bar together.  :|

Also, when typing ^K on a line that has a short piece of RTL text, the text
does not disappear: ncurses is not aware that there is text on the right side
of the display and does not emit any command sequences to clear it.  This can
also be seen by typing ^G a few times: any RTL text on the right side doesn't
get cleared when the help text is being shown.

So, for RTL or bidirectional text to work properly, it would need support
in nano itself.  I've found your nano clone on Github [1], but it seems you
didn't push any of your work there?  Probably it's far too much work to add
this support to nano, anyway.  Do you know of any terminal editor that has
full or good support for RTL text?  Or any graphical editor?  And how about
Libreoffice?  Can you write Persian in Writer without any problems?  Or are
there still some things to be desired there too?

[1] https://github.com/mahyarap/nano

Benno

signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature