Subject: bug#11016: 24.0.94; Right-to-left GUI

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2019 20:28:29 +0300

> From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <[email-masked]>
> Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2019 19:01:25 +0200
> Cc: [email-masked]
> 
> [email-masked] (Per Starbäck) writes:
> 
> > Using a locale with right-to-left writing, for example
> >
> >   LANG=ar_EG.utf8 src/emacs-24.0.94.1 -Q
> >
> > I get the menu-bar and the tool-bar in the reverse direction, that is
> > with the Help menu on the left and the File menu on the right, for
> > example.
> > This is a GTK thing. At least with  ./configure --with-x-toolkit=motif
> >  it's not like this.

Yes, because Emacs is smarter.  Various GUI toolkits foolishly reverse
the UI unconditionally based on the locale; Emacs does not.  So when
the menu bar and the tool bar are drawn by Emacs, you get the usual
left-to-right UI.

> I agree that it looks a bit odd -- but what do right-to-left users
> expect in these instances?  To have the "most important" menu to the
> right or to the left?

Some prefer one, others prefer the other.  It should be a separate
user option, because there's no one-fits-all solution, and basing the
solution on the locale is definitely wrong (one can work in a R2L
locale without speaking any R2L language).

And, as the OP correctly points out, it makes no sense to provide a
right-to-left UI when the menus and the labels on the tool-bar buttons
cannot be localized, let alone "speak" the R2L language.  Which is the
single most important reason I didn't code such an option back when I
worked on bidi Emacs.  You can still see comments to that effect in
xdisp.c.