Re: Complex script editor wish list

Herman Miller wrote:
> On Fri, 19 Sep 2003 12:36:44 -0700, JS Bangs <jaspax@...>
> wrote:
>
>
>>I don't see why you need a new text editor in order to be able to do these
>>things. Decent fonts, Unicode support, and some scripts should be able to
>>handle it. It seems that the problem lies more with support of Unicode
>>than problems inherent in a text editor.
>
>
> The problem isn't so much Unicode as the font technology. Windows only
> supports a very limited set of scripts, like Arabic and Devanagari. Support
> for Unicode doesn't imply support for correctly rendering the scripts
> encoded by Unicode.
>
>
>>>So I've been thinking of writing a primitive text editor that can be
>>>configured to handle complex scripts.
>>
>>The thing is, there already exist (at least) two very advanced editors
>>that can handle complex scripts: vi and emacs. All that's needed to add
>>support for *your* complex script is a relatively small patch.
>
>
> Vi and emacs can handle complex scripts? I always thought those were just
> text-mode editors, but it's been a long time since I saw either of them.
> What would be involved in setting one of these up on a Windows system?
Dunno about vi, but there are Unicode-support patches for emacs. There's
also yudit, which is an editor specifically designed for writing in
Unicode (you can define your own keymappings for different languages and
switch between them easily). If the interface wasn't so atrocious I'd
probably use it more often.