Hebrew

Hebrew Language support (options & mapping) for Vim

The supporting 'rightleft' functionality was originally created by Avner Lottem. <alottem at gmail dot com> Ron Aaron <ron at ronware dot org> is currently helping support these features.

Hebrew-specific 'keymap' values are "hebrew" and "hebrewp". Hebrew-useful options are 'delcombine', 'allowrevins', 'revins', 'rightleft' and 'rightleftcmd'.

The 'rightleft' mode reverses the display order, so characters are displayed from right to left instead of the usual left to right. This is useful primarily when editing Hebrew or other Middle-Eastern languages. See rileft.txt for further details.

+ Options: + 'rightleft' ('rl') sets window orientation to right-to-left. This means that the logical text 'ABC' will be displayed as 'CBA', and will start drawing at the right edge of the window, not the left edge. + 'keymap' ('kmp') sets keyboard mapping. use values "hebrew" or "hebrewp" (the latter option enables phonetic mapping) + 'delcombine' ('deco'), boolean, allows one to remove the niqud or te`amim by pressing 'x' on a character (with associated niqud).

+ 'rightleftcmd' ('rlc') makes the command-prompt for searches show up on the right side. It only takes effect if the window is 'rightleft'.

+ Encoding: + Under Unix, ISO 8859-8 encoding (Hebrew letters codes: 224-250). + Under MS DOS, PC encoding (Hebrew letters codes: 128-154). + You should prefer using UTF8, as it supports the combining-characters ('deco' does nothing if UTF8 encoding is not active).

+ Vim arguments: + vim -H file starts editing a Hebrew file, i.e. 'rightleft' is set and 'keymap' is set to "hebrew".

+ Keyboard: + The 'allowrevins' option enables the CTRL-_ command in Insert mode.

+ CTRL-_ in Insert mode toggles 'revins'.

CTRL-_ moves the cursor to the end of the typed text.

Note: On some keyboards, CTRL-_ is mapped to CTRL-?.

+ Keyboard mapping while 'keymap' is "hebrew" (standard Israeli keyboard):

q w e r t y u i o p / ' ק ר א ט ו ן ם פ

a s d f g h j k l ; ' ש ד ג כ ע י ח ל ך ף ,

z x c v b n m , . / ז ס ב ה נ מ צ ת ץ .

The 'keymap' keyboard can also insert niqud and te`amim. To see what those mappings are, look at the keymap file hebrew.vim etc.

Typing backwards

If the 'revins' (reverse insert) option is set, inserting happens backwards. This can be used to type Hebrew. When inserting characters the cursor is not moved and the text moves rightwards. A <BS> deletes the character under the cursor. CTRL-W and CTRL-U also work in the opposite direction. <BS>, CTRL-W and CTRL-U do not stop at the start of insert or end of line, no matter how the 'backspace' option is set.

There is no reverse replace mode (yet).

If the 'showmode' option is set, "-- REVERSE INSERT --" will be shown in the status line when reverse Insert mode is active.

When the 'allowrevins' option is set, reverse Insert mode can be also entered and exited via CTRL-_.

When cutting text with the mouse and pasting it in a rightleft window the text will be reversed, because the characters come from the cut buffer from the left to the right, while inserted in the file from the right to the left. In order to avoid it, toggle 'revins' (by typing CTRL-? or CTRL-_) before pasting.

Sometimes Hebrew character codes are in the non-printable range defined by the 'isprint' variable. For example in the Linux console, the Hebrew font encoding starts from 128, while the default 'isprint' variable is @,161-255. The result is that all Hebrew characters are displayed as ~x. To solve this problem, set isprint=@,128-255.