bidi support
bidi support
Posted Jun 5, 2004 14:37 UTC (Sat) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators
Modern (u)xterm has a good support for many i18n features (e.g: combined characters) . One thing it does not support is bidirectional rendering (bidi, for short). This is important for languages such as Hebrew and Arabic.
terminal emulators that support bidi (to the best of my knowledge):
* konsole, as of KDE 3.2
* mlterm
* xiterm
* Maybe emacs, with the bidi support patch
I generally dislike knosole, and I certainly don't need it to drag all the noisy KDE daemons with it. One of its nice feaatures is that I can disable the bidi support (and even set a shortcut for that).
mlterm has most of konsole's features (except, probably, bookmarks).
allows temporary disabling of bidi support at run-time (though I'm not aware of any keyboard shortcut for that. It requires using a UTF-8 locale for bidi support (no a big deal, as usually one does not need any other locale).
xiterm uses the i18n code Sun release two years ago. It does not seem to be well-maintained and does not seem to be very potent.