Emacs-bidi (was: Thunderbird with RTL?)

[Thamer Mahmoud <neokuwait at hotmail dot com>]

Moustafa Elqabbany writes:
 > assalamu alaikum.
 > 
 > so what do *you* use for mail?  Does it support RTL? 
 > And what about multiple IMAP/POP accounts?
 > 


I currently use VM (part of the Emacs-bidi package):

http://www.m17n.org/emacs-bidi/

Emacs is an editor and VM is an excellent mail reading program running
under Emacs. It does support multiple pop3/imap accounts but i haven't
tested that feature since I have an email setup similar to this [1]


As for RTL, I think the Arabic support in Emacs-bidi is merely
adequate due to these (IMO) major problems:

** As soon as you enable RTL editing/shaping you will see a huge
   performance hit. This is not bad to the extent that the program
   becomes unusable, but it makes things slow, especially with large
   buffers.

** The other problem is that it does not work with "Windows-1256"
   charset. I use utf-8 for my outgoing mail and pipe the incoming
   "Windows-1256" emails through "iconv". (Does anyone have a better
   way of dealing with this inside of emacs?)

** Plus the other limitations mentioned at the m17n.org site.


Also a few days ago, I tried the upcoming "emacs-unicode-2" beta
branch.  As far as i can tell, this is where the new bidi code is
probably heading. It's active (ie. checkins are being made these
days), but still no Bidi. The first thing that I've noticed though, is
that now I'm able to enter Arabic letters (still unshaped) through the
xkb extension by default. Nice!


Regards, 

Thamer Mahmoud


[1] http://www.mandrakeuser.org/docs/connect/cmail.html 
(some Mandrake-centric directions but the general setup should work on
all distros.)