Re: [Bug-zile] Bidirectional support in Zi

[Gary V. Vaughan]

Hi Sergei,

Please use the public mailing list for conversations about Zile and
offspring - that way you have the opportunity to get feedback from
others too, and others now and in future can benefit from the results
of the archived thread.  Even if you're not subscribed to the list
yourself, you will be Cc:ed in on any replies to a thread you take
part in.

On 13 Feb 2012, at 02:12, sergei karhof wrote:
> I have just discovered that you are working on an Emacs-like editor
> which is scriptable in Lua. This is exactly what I was looking for!!

Me too! :-)

> Emacs without Lisp! When will Zi be released?

There is no official timeline.

Currently the core features of Zi are to use Lua instead of Lisp, and
to optimise the internals for clarity and speed without slavishly
following Emacs itself.  I think that I'll probably go into bug
squashing mode shortly after Lua Zile gets a stable release, and put
Zi out once it feels stable too.

(FTR, the current Zi branch is rewindable, and somewhat stale while I
work on rebasing it back onto the head of the lua branch.  So please be
prepared to refetch the zi branch after I push the rebase.)

> An important question: will you port Emacs' bidirectional support for
> RTL languages (which has already been implemented in the latest devel.
> version of Emacs)? Please, say yes, because this feature is really
> essential for all those inteding to work with RTL languages.

I'm not at all convinced it's even possible to support RTL languages
in a text-mode editor running in a terminal emulator, and actually I'm
not even aware of any other text-mode editor that supports it (I haven't
checked, but I imagine even Emacs' support is only in GUI mode).

Also, I don't read or write, or know anyone else who reads or writes an
RTL language, so I am certainly the wrong person to work on such a feature,
as I would have no way to know whether it was working properly! ;)

However, the main reason that I wanted to work on Zi is to have a
UI independent core.  Once that goal is achieved, then it should be
quite straight forward to add a GUI text-widget with RTL support as a
compile time optional front-end.  And the beauty of git is that we can
fork and merge distributed repos very easily, so we can help each other
with patching and merging branches if you decide to work on this :)

Cheers,
-- 
Gary V. Vaughan (gary AT gnu DOT org)