Hi Richard, > Not necessarily. One could allow the first strong character in the > prompt to determine the paragraph directions
How does Emacs know what's a prompt? How can it tell it from the previous and next command's output? Whatever it does to know where the prompt is, can it be made into a standard, cross-terminal feature? > That's what the Emacs > terminal (invoked by M-x term; top level definition in term.el) does. I tried it. Executed my default shell, and inside that, a "cat TUTORIAL.he". All the paragraphs are rendered as LTR ones, left-aligned. Not the way the file is opened in Emacs. If you claim Emacs's built-in terminal emulator supports BiDi, I'm kindly asking you to present a documentation of its behavior, in similar spirit to my BiDi proposal. > Not necessarily. One might use cat to glue together files that had > split into 1400k chunks, in which case it is not even reasonable to > expect the end of file to be at a character boundary. (Yes, floppy > disks still have their uses.) I did not say anything about changing cat's behavior. I recommended to change the convention for such paragraph-oriented text files to end with two newlines. > But the white space between paragraphs is a separator, not a > terminator. One doesn't require it at the end when formatting > paragraphs within the cell of a table. Does this logic also apply to single newline characters? If not, why not, what's the conceptual difference? If it does, why do text files end in a newline? e.