Re: [Help-zile] Bidirectional support in Zi

[sergei karhof]

Finally I succeeded in joining the mailing list. In my previous
attempt, I had forgotten to append -request to the name of the mailing
list , and my attempt had gone amiss.
So, here below is the email that I have already sent privately to Gary.

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 6:18 AM, Gary V. Vaughan <address@hidden> wrote:

> I'm not at all convinced it's even possible to support RTL languages
> in a text-mode editor running in a terminal emulator, and actually I'm
> not even aware of any other text-mode editor that supports it (I haven't
> checked, but I imagine even Emacs' support is only in GUI mode).

There are at least two text-based editors that already support RTL
languages: Vim and Mined. The trick, for now, is to use a terminal
that supports bidirectionality. mlterm is fine for this purpose (and
maybe other terminals as well, but I have not looked beyond mlterm).
But it may be possible to implement bidirectional support without
relying on the terminal's bidirectional capability. Naturally, this
will require an additional amount of work.
So, the text-mode environment should not be considered an obstacle to
the development of bidirectional support in Zi.

> Also, I don't read or write, or know anyone else who reads or writes an
> RTL language, so I am certainly the wrong person to work on such a feature,
> as I would have no way to know whether it was working properly! ;)

No problem with that either, as I would be happy to help you with beta
testing. I am sure that quite a few Hebrew and Arabic speakers would
be interested in having a Lua-scriptable text editor for their
language ;)

sergei