Add support for Bi-directional text for RTL languages

[DirectorX]

using fribidi

• https://github.com/behdad/fribidi

[rafi]

This would be amazing.

[quininer]

It is a LGPL library. We can use unicode-bidi instead.

[XVilka]

I started gathering the summary gist (like I did with true color one) and linked this issue in it https://gist.github.com/XVilka/a0e49e1c65370ba11c17

[nashamri]

This would be great to have.

[textshell]

Draft and discussion about this in terminal-wg
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/terminal-wg/bidi

(Please coordinate if you are going to implement anything with bidi)

[XVilka]

@textshell and others, it was mentioned in ligatures bug - #50, seems like skribo is good choice for solving BiDi problem in Alacritty too. It was created by Mozilla and in pure Rust. Please take a look.

[egmontkob]

skribo is about beautiful rendering of glyphs.

BiDi in terminal emulators needs to be addressed beginning with way more fundamental issues, like making sure that the characters appear in the correct order and not reversed, and knowing whose responsibility (the terminal's or the emitting app's) it is to render from right to left. This is what my work aims to address, which I forgot to mention from here, but @textshell did, thanks for that.

On top of that, once you know where each character needs to appear, you can of course use whichever technique (harfbuzz, skribo etc.) to make them render as beautifully as you can.

[XVilka]

You can now check the VTE implementation: https://terminal-wg.pages.freedesktop.org/bidi/implementations.html#vte

[XVilka]

Note, that with the release of GNOME 3.34 the support of BiDi by @egmontkob is available in Gnome Terminal out of the box, which makes testing/implementing it in the other programs easier.

[niyumard]

Note, that with the release of GNOME 3.34 the support of BiDi by @egmontkob is available in Gnome Terminal out of the box, which makes testing/implementing it in the other programs easier.

Currently kitty supports Bi-directional texts too.

[nbsp]

Note, that with the release of GNOME 3.34 the support of BiDi by @egmontkob is available in Gnome Terminal out of the box, which makes testing/implementing it in the other programs easier.

Currently kitty supports Bi-directional texts too.

I checked it out, it appears that the implementation is incomplete and incorrect (Hebrew)

To elaborate, kitty messes up word order and alignment, but letters within words behave as expected.

[SafwanLjd]

Any updates on this?

[Kranzes]

This is a very much needed "feature".

[komibit]

Why did noboddy do this yet??

[chrisduerr]

Why did noboddy do this yet??

Why haven't you done it yet?

[mosaleh52]

Is there any temp solution, I need this for vim

[Kranzes]

Yes, use a different terminal, for example kitty.

[mosaleh52]

I think I will continue with konsole, thanks
this could be helpful https://terminal-wg.pages.freedesktop.org/bidi/

[f412h4d]

im switching to a new terminal, can't code in vim if the language differs

[hemedani]

@f412h4d

im switching to a new terminal, can't code in vim if the language differs

na babba!!!

[dennissherb]

6 years later, this issue is still very relevant, please implement.

[niceiq]

Is there any update on this feature?

[chrisduerr]

I'd say there's extremely little interest in adding this to Alacritty. If this is important to you, I recommend using a different terminal emulator.

[AppleSheeple]

@niceiq
Keep an eye on cosmic-term. It's still very early days. But at least they consider BiDi/RTL a first class feature.

[mamins1376]

I'd say there's extremely little interest in adding this to Alacritty. If this is important to you, I recommend using a different terminal emulator.

Is this project open to accept a potential implementation?

[chrisduerr]

It is very unlikely an outside contributor would be capable of sending a PR that would get accepted.

[zefr0x]

Maybe pop-os/cosmic-term's implementation will help when it's done. After all they are relaying on alacritty_terminal.

WIP COSMIC terminal emulator, built using alacritty_terminal that is provided by the alacritty project. cosmic-term provides bidirectional rendering and ligatures with a custom renderer based on cosmic-text.

But I don't know how it works, maybe It will not.

Edited: I tried it, and I can say that it's the best terminal for the Arabic language.

[dennissherb]

almost 7 year issue, is there any progress on this?

[originalsouth]

almost 7 year issue, is there any progress on this?

#7872

[Sliman-Baghouri]

Why hasn't this been implemented?

[wassou93]

I installed cosmic terminal (cosmic-term-git in the aur) and it doesn't only render arabic correctly it even has a scroll bar and it's GPU accelerated which is insane!!!

[misterhackerman]

Why hasn't this been implemented?

bro i guess we'll need to learn rust. and open a pull request. and then it may be.