Emacs & Hebrew

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Omer Zak <w1 at zak.co.il>
> Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2012 19:41:30 +0300
> 
> 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.

User experience and feature requests are an important feedback that I
sorely lacked.

> 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.).

If you write programs without any Hebrew characters, bidi reordering
should not reorder anything, so it's pointless to disable it.  If you
do use Hebrew character (e.g., in comments and strings), then you
_will_ want the reordering to get those readable.

Emacs needs one more feature to support bidi comments and strings 100%
correctly, but what's there now is IMO good enough already, certainly
when bidi characters are not used.  Why don't you try that?