Re: [PuTTY] : status

[Mohammed Elzubeir <elzubeir at arabeyes dot org>]

On Tue, Jun 18, 2002 at 10:13:19AM +0100, Simon Tatham wrote:
> Kamal Dalal <kamal_dalal (at) yahoo dot com> wrote:
> 
> I've been investigating the whole bidi issue since you last mailed
> us, and I've found that there's a sizable school of thought (notably
> including xterm and luit) which believes that bidi and Arabic letter
> shaping simply shouldn't be the job of a terminal emulator at all -

And those discussions we've had and they consumed so much time. The end
result is, the people who _use_ Arabic want it.. and the people
who are _not_ primary users have their own philosophy about how we
should have Arabic support. The point is, mlterm is a prime example
of what we, as a community want to be able to use. 

In a perfect world, the terminal shouldn't have to worry about it. In
the real world, it is impossible to cover all the applications as opposed
to making the terminal bidi aware.

I am afraid that 'school of thought' is something that worries me
a lot. They don't represent reality as far as I'm concerned.

> The advantages of this position are:
> 
>  - It's simple. Terminal emulators are horribly complex _already_,

Simple for who? It really doesn't make it any simpler. Is it simpler to
work on a terminal emulator that is complex or on every application you will
ever run on the host machine? Not so simple.

>    and introducing yet more layers of complexity is almost certain
>    to cause all sorts of nasty corner cases when bidi and shaping
>    start to interact with other terminal features. Keeping terminal
>    semantics simple keeps them testable and predictable.

The proposed additions should be 'options' that the user can disable
at will, so it doesn't take away from the 'predictability'.

> 
>  - Any screen-based application (such as an editor) needs to know
>    [..]
>    exactly which characters are displayed in which character cells,
>    anyway, it should therefore be the only program doing it.
> 

I didn't quite follow.


>  - Most importantly for PuTTY: _it's what xterm does_. As long as
>    PuTTY advertises itself to servers as terminal type `xterm', it
>    _must_ continue to behave as much like xterm as possible, at
>    least by default; and that means that any bidi and shaping
>    support will be turned off by default, and characters will be
>    displayed in simple left-to-right order and not shaped.

xterm does not support Arabic. So if xterm never supports Arabic Putty
wouldn't? I'm confused.

later
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