Removing the rightleft feature?

[Bram Moolenaar]

The +rightleft feature has not gotten any work done for quite a while.
In the past we would get a bug report once in a while. These days I'm
sure a lot of things have been added that do not work with 'rightleft'
set, and I haven't heard complaints.

I think 'rightleft' is most useful when working on Hebrew or Arabic
text. Any users around who do that? Is nothing broken?

The code for rightleft handling is all over the place and makes some
functions quite complex. It would help a lot if we can remove it.

On the other hand, if someone would want to pick up fixing the
+rightleft feature, the current code is probably a good starting point.
That is why it's left in until now. Even though bi-directional text
handling probably needs to be done differently, using markers in the
text. But that is also very complicated, e.g. what does "d3w" do when
some text is right-to-left?

Opinions?

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/// Bram Moolenaar -- Br...@Moolenaar.net -- http://www.Moolenaar.net \\\
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[tooth pik]

it seems to me everyone would be better served by splitting vim into two:  normal

vim that goes left to right and arabic vim (viml?) that goes right to left -- both apps

would be simpler because they wouldn't have to go both directions.

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[Bram Moolenaar]

> it seems to me everyone would be better served by splitting vim into two:
> normal vim that goes left to right and arabic vim (viml?) that goes
> right to left
> -- both apps would be simpler because they wouldn't have to go both
> directions.

This still requires a few people maintaining the right-to-left version.
With the added handicap that all changes to the left-to-right version
have to be merged. And authors of those changes won't have any idea
what trouble they cause for the right-to-left version. This is worse
than what we have now.

The current right-to-left feature is limited, all the text is reversed
in direction. Proper bidirectional support works very differently.
While at the same time, the user has to decide how the stuff besides the
text is placed: number column, signs, menus, command line, etc. Ideally
bidirectional support is added on top of the existing right-to-left
support. This does require a few people (who actually use
right-to-left) to do this work.

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