RTL with combining characters... any progress?

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Ron Aaron

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May 17, 2018, 8:02:31 PM5/17/18

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Let me say up-front, I use MacVim all the time, and I really like it. I love it. Until I have to write Hebrew. Then I don't like it... and if I have to edit Hebrew with combining characters (diacritics and cantillation marks) -- I start to tear out my remaining strands of hair.

I see that I posted about this in 2009, so I was wondering if any progress has been made since then? Perhaps there are some options I should set, but I tried the ones in the mac help file and there was nothing which changed the experience for the better.

Thanks for any help...
Ron

Tony Mechelynck

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May 18, 2018, 5:38:57 AM5/18/18

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I think this question belongs in the vim_use group but the Google Groups web interface won't let me crosspost. Please send further inquiries there, unless they concern Mac-specific questions which do not apply to Vim for Windows or Linux.

I don't know Hebrew, but occationally I write short texts in vocalised Arabic (another RTL language with combining characters) and the result is not so bad... for a text editor with no knowledge of bidi text, and where every character has a fixed width.

Display using Vim in console mode in the mlterm terminal allows for bidi text, since in that case bidirectionality is handled by the terminal, not by Vim.

Under the 'maxcombine' option (q.v.), I see that "the default value, 2, should work with most languages, but Hebrew might require 4." Have you tried that? The maximum setting is 6. Also, that option is only used when 'encoding' is utf-8, see http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Working_with_Unicode about how to set that without garbling your text. This is one case where UTF-8 is probably better than some national encoding such as ISO_8859-8.