Right to left support

[Felienne]

At this point, we do not yet support right to left languages like Arabic and Hebrew and clearly, that is something we should. It is not trivial, because it will involve:

• mirroring the whole website
• mirroring Ace
• Making sure the cursor moves the right way in Ace

This topic is meant to discuss the impact of the r2l feature and also to talk about things the core team (all left to right readers) might have missed.

[Felienne]

I have tried to understand whether Ace even supports r2l, and the answer is... I don't know. Here are some issues worth investigating:

• Fix bidi support ajaxorg/ace#3658
• Support for Arabic/Hebrew/Persian languages. ajaxorg/ace#3137 (Discussion on monospacing)
• Adding a new textDirection attribute to the Ace editor ajaxorg/ace#3041 (Discussion on cursor/text direction)
• Support for right-to-left text direction. ajaxorg/ace#3400 (More on text direction)

[cben]

FWIW https://chavascript.github.io/chavascript/ has an RTL Ace that seems to work well.
Most bidi customization is in https://github.com/ChavaScript/chavascript/blob/master/docs/src/index.js, in buildEditor() and updateLineDirection() functions.
(I have no idea if those are best practices — I don't know Ace — just remember coming across it and being curious how it worked 😁.
I speak Hebrew, ping me if you need help testing.)

[Felienne]

Thanks for the suggestion @cben! We have a draft PR open now with quite some progress: #1703 If you could do a bit of Hebrew translation so you can see if it all looks good, that'd be amazing!!

[Felienne]

Our web wizard @rix0rrr figured it out, we need an extra ace component, added in #769!

[Felienne]

Here is some relevant info if we want to pursue this further: https://rtlstyling.com/posts/rtl-styling