Re: Proposal for BiDi in terminal emulators

Hi Adam,

> Even a line is way too big a piece to be safely reordered by the terminal.
> What you propose will break every full-screen program that uses line-drawing
> characters:

Certain terminal emulators already perform BiDi on their lines. They
already break every full-screen program with line-drawing and such, as
you pointed out. What my proposal adds, amongst plenty of other
things, is a means to automatically disable the terminal's BiDi,
rather than having to go to its settings. This way you can automate
the fix of the apps that aren't explicitly fixed, e.g. via wrapper
scripts, or terminfo entries with special ti/te definitions.

> I'm afraid there's no good way to do BiDi without support from individual
> programs.

Depends on the use case.

For complex apps, like text editors, you are right, the terminal
emulator must stay out of the game.

For simple utilities, like "cat" and friends, there's no way you can
implement BiDi support in "cat" itself. Here the terminal needs to do
it.

Your use case with tables is perhaps somewhat in the middle. One
possible approach for the emitting utility is to disable BiDi in the
terminal (switch to "explicit" mode) for the scope of this output.
Another possible approach is to leave the terminal doing BiDi, but
embed all the text fragments in FSI...PDI blocks. (This latter is
subject to a bit of further research, to be exactly specified in a
forthcoming version of the specs.)

What is extremely tough here is realizing that there are multiple
conflicting requirements (including the example you gave), and coming
up with a soluiton that satisfies the needs of all. This is what my
work aims to do.

cheers,
egmont
Received on Wed Jan 30 2019 - 08:08:16 CST