> From: Egmont Koblinger <[email protected]> > Date: Tue, 5 Feb 2019 02:28:50 +0100 > Cc: [email protected] > > I have to admit, I'm not an Emacs user, I only have some vague ideas > how powerful a tool it is. But in its very core I still believe it's a > text editor – is it fair to say this? It could be used for example to > conveniently create TUTORIAL.he.
It is a text editing/processing environment which has a lot of text-based applications built on top of it. It could (and was) used to create TUTORIAL.he, but it can and is used for much more. > There are plenty of line-oriented tools. > [...] Actually, for every utility you mention, Emacs has a command that either invokes the utility and presents its output, or does the same job by using built-in features. So most/all of the jobs you mention are routinely done in Emacs. After all, Emacs is a programmer's editor at its core, so every job programmers routinely do from the shell prompt has an equivalent feature in Emacs. You can even run shells inside Emacs, with Emacs serving as a terminal emulator (which then supports bidi ;-). > There are just sooooooo many use cases, it's impossible to perfectly > address all of them at once. I don't think you need to look for a perfect solution. You need to look for one that works reasonably well in practice. It is my experience in Emacs that the empty line as paragraph delimiter produces much better results than if you treat each line as a separate paragraph. We do have in Emacs features that allow to override the default paragraph direction, but experience shows that they are used relatively rarely. > I'm confident that my specification which says that it should be > preserved as a 100 character long paragraph and passed to BiDi > accordingly is already a significant step forward. I agree, but I urge you to make one more step, which IME is really necessary.
