command to align text from right to left (rtl)

[noor-tg]

hi,
first thank you for making this amazing code editor.

I want a command to allow to align all the document text from right to left (rtl). all the document or per line.
this can be used for languages like Arabic, Urdu. so if I have markdown document contains this languages letters . I can use this command to show it from right to left as expected.

this is how markdown with arabic language show in helix:

thank you.

[A-Walrus]

This is quite tricky for multiple reasons. One of them is that terminal emulators may exhibit different behaviors when dealing with RTL text.
For example, Kitty by default, will flip the order of RTL characters within a word, but not the order of words, while other terminal emulators don't flip anything at all.
Kitty:

Alacritty:

This might have to wait until there is a GUI version of Helix, where we can have full control over text rendering.

[noor-tg]

I use kitty with hilex . and I toke the screenshot above when using it.

so. there is no way to handle text from right to left (words and characters) in terminal ?

[A-Walrus]

Pretty much. There have been some attempts, for example with Vim, but in my opinion none of them work well enough to be generally useful.
Bidirectional text is hard, even more so in a terminal.

[noor-tg]

ok , thank you @A-Walrus .

[zefr0x]

This is quite tricky for multiple reasons. One of them is that terminal emulators may exhibit different behaviors when dealing with RTL text. For example, Kitty by default, will flip the order of RTL characters within a word, but not the order of words, while other terminal emulators don't flip anything at all. Kitty: Alacritty:

This might have to wait until there is a GUI version of Helix, where we can have full control over text rendering.

RTL/Arabic support in Kitty and Alacritty is just broken (it is not about different behaviors). No one should try to fix it from the applications' side.

If any one would work in it the new cosmic-term has the greatest support i've ever seen in a terminal for RTL/Arabic and bidirectional text.
KDE's Konsole is also great, GNOME Terminal is good, but some small things are still broken on them regarding character rendering and spacing between characters.

I believe that if Arabic will be supported in Helix inside a terminal, it should be on top of a terminal that supports it e.g. cosmic-term, no other terminal with broken support should be considered.

For now on top of cosmic-term there is no problem in Helix that I can see other than text alignment to the left (it should be to the right).