On Thu, Apr 12, 2007 at 04:38:54PM +0200, Roman Zippel wrote: > Considering this possible volatility I'm not certain we really need this > in the kernel. > The other point is that I have problems imagining, that this should be > enough to edit random text files with a random editor without problems.
No, this would not be enough for all special corner cases. It would just be better than currently it is. That's my goal. > OTOH if the editor has to all this parsing anyway, the whole thing could > be pushed to userspace and the Linux terminal could be marked as handling > all characters equally (a good hint would be if the terminal doesn't even > support wide characters). The terminfo database exists for a good reason Currently not even applications and terminal emulators agree on the width. I don't think terminfo has anything to do with it. Width information should come from glibc, but unfortunately its database is quite old, so applications tend to implement their own version. (Example: according to glibc 2.5, U+0221 is not printable. Still it's present in many fonts, and at least vim and joe display them.) So, there are several (maybe a few hundred or few thousands) characters that are handled differently by different applications/libraries. On the other hand, there are approximately 42.000 characters in BMP that are double-width according to every width specification or implementation I've seen so far. That's roughly the 2/3 of all the code points in BMP. Why is a problem if the kernel knows to jump 2 character cells on them? I'm not seeking for a perfect solution. (Taking a look at the current state of specs/libs/apps perfect solution doesn't even exist.) I'm seeking for something that is just way better than the current situation. -- Egmont - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
