Emacs & Hebrew

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2012 23:33:27 +0300
> From: Nadav Har'El <nyh at math.technion.ac.il>
> Cc: linux-il at cs.huji.ac.il
> 
> As an example of the confusion that bidi might cause me when editing the
> Hspell source code, conside what it might to do a regular expression:
> Imagine that I wrote s/א/ב/ with the intension of switching aleph into bet,
> but (I just checked...) the bidi algorithm applied to it will display the
> order *reversed* making it confusingly appear that the code is changing bet
> into aleph...

The right thing is have an Emacs feature to help you in these
situations.  Not to turn bidi reordering off, because there might be
other parts of the same buffer (e.g., comments) where you _do_ want
reordering.

> I think you must agree that the unicode bidi algorithm was never designed
> for such use cases - and I'm not "blaming" these issues on your
> implementation, of course - and I don't even need to try your
> implementation to know it will have this - or similar - issues when
> editing source code. And editing mostly-ASCII source code is 99% of what I
> personally use Emacs for.

We are talking about Emacs, not about the UBA.  Emacs already uses the
"high-level protocols" fire escape provided by the UBA to redefine
what a paragraph is (the basic UBA says it's a physical line, which
would make the bidi display useless).  It could use such protocols
more, and it could use its advanced display features to produce better
display in these cases.  The key to having this is to use Emacs 24 and
report bugs and missing features.  By contrast, turning the reordering
off will never yield any improvement in this area, and is only a
stopgap solution never designed to be a real feature.

> Again, nothing I said or asked applies to writing *text*, such as email.
> For text, bidi is definitely required, and really welcome. I sorely miss a
> bidi-capable editor for my email writing - unfortunately I have a 20 year
> old habit of writing emails in vi, so it'll take me a bit of time to decide
> to switch to emacs also for emails. But now I know I definitely should!

I use Emacs 24 for my emails for quite some time now, and it works
well.