Emacs & Hebrew

[Nadav Har'El]

On Tue, Jun 12, 2012, Omer Zak wrote about "Re: Emacs & Hebrew":
> On Tue, 2012-06-12 at 19:05 +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > You know, it is quite ironic that, having heard about a major Free
> > Software project which now fully supports bidirectional scripts
> > including Hebrew, the first thing people here ask is how to disable
> > that feature.  Not whether it works, not if it's any good, not how
> > well it supports this or that aspect of bidirectional editing -- but
> > how to turn it off.  A sobering experience, I must say.

Life's strange, isn't it ;-)

But seriously, when someone announces a new feature, why would you
expect the first question to be "is it any good" or "whether it works"?
Obviously, if it weren't any good, or didn't actually work - it wouldn't
have been announced... At least, that's how it (usually) works in free
software (as opposed to the commercial software world) - people don't announce
things because of the marketing buzz this generates, but because they
are proud of the new feature, which they often created to scratch their
own itch.

Finally, I don't think the question of "how to turn it off" should
surprise you in a list of developers. Bidi is great for writing texts,
but since until now writing Hebrew text in Emacs wasn't a great idea,
people didn't do it. What they did do with Emacs is writing code,
editing config files, and similar things. With those, Bidi is sometimes
a distraction, not a desired feature - so people want to be able to turn
it off.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |                 Wednesday, Jun 13 2012, 
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