Emacs & Hebrew

[Omer Zak]

On Wed, 2012-06-13 at 19:22 +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 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?

At the time I considered helping the effort.  However, Emacs is too big
piece of software to dive into without investing serious time.

> > 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?

I did try to edit code with embedded Hebrew strings using BiDi compliant
editors such as Gedit, and it was indeed a disaster.  Not because of any
usability shortcoming of the editor, but because of the very nature of
the BiDi algorithm.  Emacs was good for editing such files, and I am
glad that Emacs remains this way (by having the option to turn off BiDi
algorithm - and I suggest to turn BiDi off by default in all major
modes, which are used for programming language supporting Hebrew glyphs
in constant strings, such as Python, Java, etc.).

--- Omer
P.S.: I hope to install Emacs 24 as soon as it is backported to Debian
Squeeze or Debian Wheezy.


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