Re: [I18n]Re: Bidi terminal emulation considered harmful
On Wed, 28 Nov 2001, Markus Kuhn wrote:
> You might end up with the same conclusion as I did: Bidi is best kept
> completely out of the terminal and the vision of bidi ever working as
> naturally and simple between terminals and simple Unix tools such as cat
> or ls is probabaly a naive illusion.
But if you don't aim for "working flowlessly"?
Frankly I'm fairly satisfied with current bidi xterm. Although it's most
important feature is that I can easily disable the bidi support when it is
getting in my way.
Generally it works well for viewing content.
> Making bidi simple will make a lot
> of other things horribly complicated, and very few developers will
> follow. The use of Hebrew, Arabic and Syriac in writing order should
> under Unix probabaly be restricted to text editors and word processors.
> In file names, urls, environment variables, etc., use either visual
> order or the latin script. Really.
Visual order?
ls |sort
File names are essentially texts in many contexts .
Also keep in mind that on win32 Hebrew/Arabic filenames are very common.
MS-Word defaults to giving the first line of the document as the document
name (because it might be the title, and it is just as good a guess as
"noname01"). So in this case text becomes file names.
So bidirectional file names are already here, whether or not they are a
Good Thing [tm].
--
Tzafrir Cohen
mailto:tzafrir@technion.ac.il
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir
Reply to: