A look at terminal emulators, part 1: more on bidi and such

I actually object to the article's "they should be rendered right to left when displayed" and "handle this correctly [i.e. rendering right to left]": terminal input doesn't really have a good concept of where paragraphs start or end, what the base directionality of the paragraph is, and so on, so it's hard to say that any attempted bidi rendering really is "correct". Picking arbitrary answers such as "each line is considered a new paragraph" makes text really hard to follow due to the incorrect reordering for text that doesn't match that arbitrary answer.

While rendering rtl text left to right does make that text very slow to read, it does at least have the advantage that it's clear what the logical order is (avoiding the ls problem referred to above), so I would often prefer the ltr approach when using a terminal. However, I'll grant that this is only viable because I don't use an rtl locale for LC_MESSAGES.

(I wonder, is there any value in the Mongolian solution, i.e. rotating the text so that everything is written top-to-bottom instead of either ltr or rtl ? 90°-rotated text is still a bit slower to read than unrotated text, but much quicker than reading ltr isolated-form letters for arabic script.)