Re: BiCon 0.0.20040401 problems

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at cs dot toronto dot edu>]

Hi there,  thanks for testing.  My comments below:

On Sat, 10 Apr 2004, Munzir Taha wrote:

> really great. Many bugs are there which is well expected from an alpha
> release.

I'm afraid many of these are not going to be fixed (read below)
:(.

> Here is my experience:
>
> I downloaded bicon, ./configure, make, make install (as root). Now,
> In a gnome-terminal
> [emunzir at localhost emunzir]$ bicon
> BiCon started
> [emunzir at localhost emunzir]$ man man
> doesn't display properly

Do you mean with Arabic (translated) man?  Or the English one
doesn't work?

> 1. It shows only in half of the screen
> 2. Enter doens't work. It should scroll one line down.

Same question as above.

> 3. the phrase "line 1-27" comes in the middle of the screen with text below it
> 4. vim display INSERT also half the way on screen
> 5. cat'ing any arabic filename will work with shaping but upon typing Arabic
> if I pressed BACKSPACE to delete a letter and type again, it will appear in
> the wrong position
> 6. less'ing an Arabic file won't work.

Well, that's kind of a thing that is not going to be fixed in
BiCon any soon :(.  Right now BiCon is only a very thin layer
doing bidi on the *stream* coming to terminal.   Some of the
things you wrote can be supported, but some other ones simply
cannot, at least without application support.  Of course an
approach like what they are doing in PuTTY will solve many of
these problems, but will create its own problems.

BiCon better be used for simple cmd-line stuff that does not do
escape-sequence tricks.  Well, it's there as a final resort.  If
you really need to be able to read Arabic on console, use it...

> I turned to console (Ctrl+Alt+F1), loged in, bicon
> I tried Left alt+shift  and tried to type the letter "e" I got a strange
> question mark. alt+shift again or anything i tried won't allow me to type
> "e". Hence, I couldn't type "exit" to exit and stuck there. Once stucked, I
> tried vim from console, typing "e" gave me the euro sign. Now, I can't type
> ":" to exit. It doesn't work. Ctrl+z got me out of vim. I tried Alt+F7 to
> return to GUI but no use. Sequential Ctrl+D's loged me out and now Alt+F7
> back to GUI. Sigh! I decided not to return to that frightening blackhole until
> it's fixed.

This one's really weird.  You only entered "bicon"?  What was
your $LANG?  Better I turn off keymap setting for console too.
You can ask for keymap explicitly by saying "bicon ir" or
something like that.  BTW, wait a couple of days and I will make
another release and please test again.

> I am using Mandrake 10

Well, never used Mandrake.  But it may be that they do their own
tricks on console.

BTW, thanks for the feedback.

--behdad
  behdad.org