alt Hacker News> How often are complex scripts rendered in terminal?
If you speak the languages that use those scripts? Then all the time, I imagine. The support for double-char width cells in the terminals started to appear all the way back in the late seventies because Japan, you know, existed and kinda mattered.
I am deeply ignorant on the matter.
All the languages I am literate in use an alphabet and I have never encountered a script in anything other alphabetic scripts in the terminal, and never anything not in English for serious work.
I would think we would probably have far fewer characters with hard to determine widths being printed in terminal (before LLMs) as most of it would be rendered in the GUI, which state of the art terminal emulators somewhat rely on anyway.
My guess is that LLMs made translation for these sorts of tools much easier (just needing someone fluent in both languages to verify rather than translate from scratch) but that's why I am asking. Is it more common now than ever before?
Beyond that the examples given were of scripts that are widely used in India which is a country with the world's largest English speaking population and one of the world's most spoken English dialects and also a huge IT sector.
I get that CJK has an existing double width carve out, that is being proposed to be kept by the objection linked in the article.