Forthcoming GNU Emacs supports BIDI

Good news

The latest development version of GNU Emacs supports bidirectional text. If you want to use Hebrew, Arabic, etc. then this is what you should use. See below for installation.

Installation

1. Install bzr as root.
   • Debian Squeez or later, Ubuntu 9.10 or later

     
     # aptitude install bzr
     	

   • Debian Lenny

     
     # echo 'deb http://www.backports.org/debian lenny-backports main' >> /etc/apt/sources
     # aptitude update
     # aptitude -t lenny-backports install bzr
     	

   • Fedora 12 or later

     
     # yum install bzr
     	

2. Get the source code of the latest GNU Emacs. This may take some time.

   
   $ bzr branch http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/r/emacs/trunk
       

3. Compile the source.

   
   $ cd trunk	
   $ ./configure
   $ make; make info
       

Information

When the compilation is finished, start Emacs with the following command.

$ src/emacs

Then read the info file with the following key sequence.
C-u C-h i /your/emacs/directory/info/emacs RET

Biderectional text is explained in Node 26.20. Go though (emacs)Top > International > Bidirectional Editing.

There is an old branch of GNU Emacs called Emacs-bidi. It is based on GNU Emacs 21.3.50 and lacks many features that are supported by recent Emacsen. It still works, but will not be maintained anymore.