> From: Egmont Koblinger <[email protected]> > Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2019 10:21:52 +0100 > Cc: Adam Borowski <[email protected]>, [email protected] > > > Does anyone know of a terminal emulator which supports isolates? > > GNOME Terminal's (VTE's) current work-in-progress implementation does > remember BiDi control characters just like it remembers combining > accents, that is, tied to the preceding letter's cell. It uses FriBidi > 1.0 for the BiDi work, so yes, it supports Unicode 6.3's isolates.
So we will some day have one such terminal emulator. That's good, but a text-mode application that needs to support bidi cannot rely on its users all having access to that single terminal. > There's one significant issue, though. Because we currently just > misuse our existing infrastructure of combining accents for the BiDi > controls, BiDi controls at the very beginning of a paragraph are > dropped. Addressing this issue would need core changes to the terminal > emulation behavior, such as introducing in-between-cells storage, or > zero-width special characters belonging to a cell _before_ the cell's > actual letter, or something like this. I outline one idea in my > specification, but it's subject to discussion to finalize it. This is indeed a significant issue, because it means applications cannot force the terminal use a certain non-default base paragraph direction.
