Terminal environments are always awful at RTL, they always need to make shitty compromises that graphical environments just don’t need to make. The fact that you even need a RTL mark is already a bad start - graphical text renderers can deduce text directionality based on the characters in it.
Try using a website in an RTL language some time. Facebook and Google both support Arabic and Hebrew for example. The entire site is flipped - a left sidebar would instead appear on the right, a logo might be at the top right instead of top left, etc. Getting it right is hard, especially with mixed RTL/LTR content (like if you have a Hebrew page with some English words on it).
Neat. That’s something I never even thought of. When typing in Arabic, does the cursor proceed from right to left, then?
Is this somehow handled with locales, are custom operating systems required, or is it really only handled by specific editors like word processors?
I’m trying to imagine how this would work at, say, a console bash prompt.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-left_mark
It’s just a Unicode character; Copy-Paste and experiment!
(If you’d like more direction on how to play with this in a *NIX terminal let me know.)
Terminal environments are always awful at RTL, they always need to make shitty compromises that graphical environments just don’t need to make. The fact that you even need a RTL mark is already a bad start - graphical text renderers can deduce text directionality based on the characters in it.
Try using a website in an RTL language some time. Facebook and Google both support Arabic and Hebrew for example. The entire site is flipped - a left sidebar would instead appear on the right, a logo might be at the top right instead of top left, etc. Getting it right is hard, especially with mixed RTL/LTR content (like if you have a Hebrew page with some English words on it).