Re: Bidirectional text and URLs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 02 Dec 2014 09:42:42 -0500
> From: Richard Stallman <address@hidden>
> CC: address@hidden, address@hidden
> 
>   > > We need a convenient _user-level_ feature to make them visible.
> 
>   > We have glyphless-char-display-control, which is a defcustom.  If that
>   > is still too technical, we can have a minor mode to set that for these
>   > directional controls,
> 
> A minor mode would be convenient enough for non-wizard users.
> 
>   > I think we should prefer making them visible only in the context where
>   > they could cause harm.  Making them visible everywhere could be an
>   > annoyance.
> 
> It would only be an annoyance for users who really use bidi,
> and they would turn it off so it would not annoy them again.

But even users who do use bidi would like to be warned when these
controls are part of potential URL phishing.  So there's a
contradiction here, at least for those users: they would like a
warning when these controls could be harmful, but would like to avoid
the warning when they aren't.

>   > But even if I'd agree with you, making a convenient and reliable way
>   > of going back to unidirectional display of Emacs 23 and before would
>   > require a lot of work, because the current display engine no longer
>   > supports unidirectional display without reordering, at least not
>   > reliably.
> 
> It is easy to make an option turn off bidi processing.
> All it has to do is make all characters seem LTR.

That doesn't disable reordering, it just makes the results
indistinguishable.  Perhaps I don't understand what you want to do
with this option.