Did you try?: set rightleft

Original comment by mattn.jp on 10 Mar 2014 at 4:21

That is what I'm using, yes.  But notice here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_text_editors#Right-to-left_and_bidire
ctional_text

Support for right-to-left text is not the same as bidirectional text support.  
If I have a file with English and Hebrew in the same file, I can only read one 
language at a time, depending on the direction of the text.  Bidirectional 
support would mean that I would be able to read both languages at the same time 
(the text for both languages displays correctly).

I won't pretend to know how this should be implemented, but this article might 
give a bit more detail on how it works:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bi-directional_text#Unicode_support

Thanks.

Original comment by casey.be...@gmail.com on 11 Mar 2014 at 12:01

It's really needed. Nearly ALL of modern editors support this feature. +1

I started gathering the summary gist (like I did with true color one) and linked this issue in it https://gist.github.com/XVilka/a0e49e1c65370ba11c17

Full-bidi would IMHO be extremely hard (and therefore error-prone) to implement in Vim, which never was a WYSIWYG text processor but just a plain text editor.

The recommended way to have Vim display full-bidi text is to let the terminal take care of it (which also means running Vim in a bidi-capable terminal and not as gvim). The mlterm terminal can do full-bidi, and Vim is aware of it, but you might have to get its source and compile it yourself: e.g. AFAICT my (openSUSE Linux) distro does not have it in its software repositories.

See also :help 'termbidi'

Best regards,
Tony.

For now, as a workaround, I'd :split (or :vsplit) a window on the same buffer, :set rightleft in the new window and 'scrollbind' in both windows.

neatvi already supports it and it works flawlessly for Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, etc. languages even with a non-BIDI terminal. Can we add neatvi BIDI feature to vim?

The author of neatvi has already released a patch for this issue here but it seems to be neglected!

THere is also a similar request for Nvim project here.

Please note, recently there was created a working group regarding BiDi support in a console:

• https://terminal-wg.pages.freedesktop.org/bidi/
• https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/terminal-wg/bidi

Note, that with the release of GNOME 3.34 the support of BiDi by @egmontkob is available in Gnome Terminal out of the box, which makes testing/implementing it in the other programs, such as Vim way easier.

I have a problem with Vim in a BiDi supported libvte based terminal like gnome-terminal :

Zero width non-joiner (ZWNJ) shows as the unicode escape (<200c>). A workaround is given below which is not great since it hides the ZWNJ and does not join the persian chars:
https://vi.stackexchange.com/questions/17900/how-to-make-vim-display-zwnj-characters-correctly

The problem is also mentioned below even though it is not relevant to kitty terminal:
kovidgoyal/kitty#1851