kovidgoyal / kovidgoyal/kitty

BiDirectional text support

Open
#2,109 16 comments 24 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
enhancement help wanted
Dominant language
Python
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Forks
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

In the modern world, the support for some languages that are right-to-left and mixing them with left-to-write words and numbers is crucial for a different software. At some point, this should be supported everywhere, including the console.

I started to gather the information about BiDi support in various console terminals (and programs) in analogy with true color crusade at https://gist.github.com/XVilka/a0e49e1c65370ba11c17

New [console BiDi specification](https://terminal-wg.pages.freedesktop.org/bidi/) was recently implemented in libvte by @egmontkob: https://terminal-wg.pages.freedesktop.org/bidi/implementations.html#vte

Note, that with the release of [GNOME 3.34](https://www.gnome.org/news/2019/09/gnome-3-34-released/) the support of BiDi is available in Gnome Terminal out of the box, which makes testing/implementing it in the other programs, such as kitty way easier.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

The issue points to kitty's console support and the linked terminal-wg BiDi specification, with libvte and GNOME Terminal as reference implementations. Start by reading the specification and implementation list, then compare kitty's current behavior with those references. Done requires a concrete scope for BiDi support and tests demonstrating the specified behavior.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
c, python
Domain
cli, internationalization
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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