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# Bidirectional text

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From Wikipedia:Bidirectional text, is text that contains two text directionalities, right-to-left (RTL) and left-to-right (LTR).

## Concepts

Text direction
  while editing, setting text direction changes the interaction of the editor with the text. It affects text navigation, selection, and insertion.
Text alignment
  a stylized form of presenting text. E.g: English text can be aligned to the right despite being LTR language, but this does not change the direction of the text which is LTR.
Fake Bidi
  a fake locale displaying completely reversed English sentences to mimic a RTL context. This helps who are not familiar with RTL language to visualize RTL issues. For example:

      This English sentence contains SDROW CIBARA EMOS and ends with English words.

Poor man's bidi mode
  automatic visual text order right-to-left input in normal terminal.
Logical navigation
  words are traversed as they are read.
Visual navigation
  words are traversed as they are displayed. This GIF demonstrates the difference between the two.

Logical navigation is the correct way of navigation that programs should implement to fully support Bidi.

Unicode support
  In Unicode-supported text editors, text direction can be controlled by inserting special formatting characters in front of it: Wikipedia:RLM (U+200F), Wikipedia:LRM (U+200E), which is a workaround for text editors not supporting switching text direction.

Bidirectional Algorithm
  is the set of rules applied to display text in the correct order.

## Support

In order for a program to fully support Bidi text, it must have:

Text shaping (RTL shaping)
  correctly apply letter rendering and ligatures. See W:harfbuzz and Complete Text Layout.
Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm (UBA)
  determine the directionality of text segments and apply the appropriate rendering rules.
Editing and input (Nav)
  the ability to force text direction and correct behavior of cursor movement, selection, deletion, and insertion (logical navigation).

Some implementations of UBA and letter-shaping:

- fribidi is an open source implementations of Bidi Algorithm.
- python-bidiAUR is a python library for related functions.
- SheenBidi: Improved Unicode Implementation in C.

### Browsers

App | RTL | UBA | Nav | Notes
--- | --- | --- | --- | ---
chromium | Yes | No | No |
firefox | Yes | No | No |
qtwebbrowser | Yes | Yes | No |
webkit | Yes | Yes | No |

### Editors

App | RTL | UBA | Nav | Notes
--- | --- | --- | --- | ---
AbiWord | Yes | No | No |
emacs | Yes | No | No | With extension. See also: emacs bidi editing.
gedit | Yes | Yes | No | For Gedit <= 2.1, workaround by extension.
ghostwriter | Yes | Yes | No | Qtwebbrowser-based
kate | Yes | Yes | No |
LibreOffice | Yes | No | Yes | See: LibreOffice#Bidirectional support
marktextAUR | Yes | No | No | Blink-based
neovim | No | No | Yes | See Vim#Bidirectional support
notepadqq | Yes | No | No | Won't fix.
texworks | Yes | Yes | No |
vim | No | [dead link 2025-01-19 ⓘ] No | Yes | see Vim#Bidirectional support
featherpad | Yes | Yes | No |
Visual Studio Code | Yes | No | No |
mousepad | Yes | Yes | No |
pluma | Yes | Yes | No |
GTK | Yes | Yes | No |
xed | Yes | Yes | No |

### Terminal

VTE-based terminals support special escape sequences that changes Bidi behavior. For example, to enable UBA support for command output, use `echo '\e[?2501h'`. For reading more about Bidi escaping sequences see [1].

App | RTL | UBA | Nav | Notes
--- | --- | --- | --- | ---
alacritty | No | No | No | Tested with alacritty version 0.13.0-3, the 2024-01-03. Does not support RLO (U+202E).
contour | No | No | No | Tested with contour version 0.3.12, the 2024-01-03. Does not support RLO (U+202E).
dvtm | No | No | No |
extraterm | No | No | No | Tested with extraterm-binAUR version 0.74.0-1, the 2024-01-03. Does not support RLO (U+202E).
kitty | Yes | No |  | Tested with kitty version 0.31.0-1, the 2024-01-02. Does not support RLO (U+202E).
konsole | Yes | No |  | Tested with konsole version 23.08.4-2, the 2024-01-02.
libvte | Yes | No |  | including libvte-based like Gnome, sakura, xfce4, terminator... Minor issues: 1
mltermAUR | Yes | No |  | Tested with mltermAUR version 3.9.3-2, the 2024-01-03.
neatvi-gitAUR | No |  |
pymux |  | No |  |
qterminal | No | No |  | Tested with qterminal version 1.4.0-1, the 2024-01-02. Does not support RLO (U+202E).
radare2 |  | No |  |
Terminator | Yes | No |  | Tested with terminator version 2.1.3-3, the 2024-01-02.
tmux |  | No |  | Won't fix
Urxvt | No | No |  | Tested with rxvt-unicode version 9.31-4, the 2024-01-03. Does not support RLO (U+202E).
wezterm |  | No |  |
xstAUR |  | No |  |
less | – | No | – |

### Other

App | RTL | UBA | Notes
--- | --- | --- | ---
electronjs |  | No |
groff | No | No |
irssi |  | No |
latex | Yes | Yes | Using LuaTeX or XeLaTeX with polyglossia
Pandoc | Yes | No
typst | Yes | No
Wikipedia:HTML | Yes | Yes |
wine | Yes | No |

## Troubleshooting

Verify UTF-8 Encoding is properly configured first. Make sure you install the fonts corresponding to your language: Arabic, Persian, Hebrew. For some terminals, (bicon-gitAUR) is required to properly display RTL text.

## See also

### Internal links

- Locale
- Localization

### External links

- freedesktop specification for Bidi support: terminal.
- Comprehensive guide of RTL styling in HTML

Category:

- Input methods

Hidden category:

- Pages with dead links