Emacs & Hebrew

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: nyh at math.technion.ac.il (Nadav Har'El)
> Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2012 08:50:25 +0300
> 
> 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 ;-)

You mean, disappointing?  Yes, it is.  To hear such questions from
Nadav Har'El, of all the people.

> 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...

This contradicts complaints, by Omer and others, earlier in this
thread about every other editor with bidi support: Gedit, Abiword,
Gvim.  Evidently what you think should not happen happens...

And since the bidirectional display for Emacs was developed in almost
complete isolation from this community -- not a single input or
response to several design discussions I posted -- why would anyone
assume that an essentially one-man project will not end up being a
complete disaster from usability point of view?

> 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.

How do you know it's a distraction, if you didn't yet try it?