My day job involves a fair bit of coding and I do most of the stuff in the terminal. But there is one sore spot that still bugs me to this day. All terminal emulators I’ve used don’t have complex text layout support.
CTL is something required by Arabic and Brahmic scripts. I’m from Myanmar and Myanmar script is one of the Brahmic family of scripts. I’ve seen Indians also having this problem with their Devanagari script as well. I mean I don’t need it too often but when I do, I have to open up a GUI text editor to edit.
I just want to know if there’s something inherently fundamental in terminal emulators that makes it hard to support CTL? Is there even a terminal emulator with CTL support?
Yeah, I’ve tried Emacs actually. Since it’s like a full GUI app, there’s support. I just got too invested in Vim and don’t wanna switch.
If you want CTL text layout support but want to use Vim, you can use a version of Emacs with Vim emulation extensions pre-installed. The easiest way to do this is to install Doom Emacs or Spacemacs which do all the tricky configuration things necessary to make it work and feel more consistently like Vim, and it just works out of the box.
I tried it a few years back but gave up because I couldn’t get it to work the way my vim setup used to. May be I should give it a try again sometime.
Have you tried gvim?
Tried a lot of neovim GUIs. The only one that sort of works is Onivim2. It just has some spacing issues. It really looks promising. Super fast compared to VSCode variants.