Support Right to Left (RTL) text

[MahdiGhiasi]

• What you're doing and what's happening: When writing some right-to-left characters (Farsi, Arabic, ...) after some left-to-right characters, the rtl text goes from the cursor position into the left, causing it to be mixed with the ltr text written before.

• Steps to reproduce: Open a Windows Terminal window. write some english characters, like abcdef. Then write some Farsi/Arabic text, like:

    سلام
  

  Notice that the Farsi text goes inside the english text.

• Screenshot:

• what should be happening instead: As console is generally left to right, the rtl text should begin more on the right (cursor should go to right), and it should end exactly when the ltr text ended. See how Notepad (correctly) handles this situation:

• Windows build number: 10.0.18362.86

[jalchr]

30 years and we still can't render Arabic characters inside Windows terminal, while Ubuntu and Mac can do !

[DHowett-MSFT]

30 years and we still can't render Arabic characters inside Windows terminal, while Ubuntu and Mac can do !

@jalchr Thanks for reaching out. Comments like this are not substantive and do not add to the discussion.

[jalchr]

Thanks for getting the notice.
I have been reading the issues and people are shouting out for the Arabic support, while the responses were not encouraging.
We are building a new terminal right?
It should be at least like if not better than what is already on the table

[zadjii-msft]

We're all for adding RTL support, but know that doing that would require a lot of work.

Much of the new Terminal's codebase is directly shared with the old console codebase, and there are lots of places in that code that assume the text is all LTR. Any fixes for the Terminal would need to make sure to not break existing console behavior in this regard.

I'm not saying it's impossible to support RTL, or that we won't. I'm just saying that based on the volume of work it'd require, it's probably not a 1.0 feature, unless we get a lot of help from the community.

[jalchr]

It might suffice for v1.0 to at least render Arabic characters correctly