Re: [emacs-bidi] Points composition - status.

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Yair Friedman (Jerusalem)" <address@hidden>
> Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 18:25:05 +0200
> 
> I think it would be the best if the cursor would change the shape of the
> cursor to reflect the position of the character within the
> composition.

Let me remind you that some display types supported by Emacs, most
notably the character-based terminal, don't support changes in cursor
shape.  We need a solution that works on all types of display, or at
least a back-up solution which will work where cursor shape cannot be
changed.

> forward/backward-char concept should go over one diacritic
> at a time. 

Does that mean that I'll have to type C-f N+1 times to move across a
character which has N diacriticals?  IMHO that would be a _major_
inconvenience for users, and will also confuse them: the cursor will
appear to be ``stuck'' even though you type C-f.  On character
terminals, where the diacriticals will not be displayed at all, the
confusion will be even more profound.

I'd expect that in the vast majority of cases, users want to move by
base characters, and only seldom do they need to ``enter'' the
diacriticals layer.  I think Emacs should cater to the frequent cases,
not to the seldom ones.

> The way I see it is that a diacritical is just a character by itself -
> in case that it is in a pattern that matches a composition, the *display*
> is different.

That's true as far as Emacs internals are concerned, but Emacs doesn't
need to expose that to users.  There's nothing particularly
complicated about making C-f move to the next base character; if
that's what users expect, I think we should code it like that.

Likewise, if the frequent case is that users want to remove the base
character with all its diacriticals (as I think they do), we should
make DEL by default do that, and provide a way to delete diacriticals
one by one by some modification of DEL.