GEdit – How to Switch Text Direction in GEdit?

geditrtltext-editor

I want GEdit to show all paragraphs in right-to-left view. I know that it renders paragraphs starting with rtl characters correctly. But I need paragraphs starting with ltr characters also shown as rtl.

Something like vim -F or set: rl command in Vim.n

Best Answer

You can force a paragraph to be RTL by adding Unicode control U+200F RIGHT-TO-LEFT MARK (RLM) to the beginning of the paragraph. Using:

Crtl+Shift+u Then 200f Enter

For easy entry, you may have to customize you keyboard layout. See reference.

There are more Unicode control characters:

U+200E LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK (LRM), To do the reverse on a right-to-left environment.
U+061C ARABIC LETTER MARK (ALM), Note: Most users uses RLM instead which is more general and it works for Arabic scripts too.
More at Wikipedia: Bidirectional Text.

References:

Related Solutions

Text Editor – Stop Gedit, Gvim, Vim, Nano from Adding End-of-File Newline Character

For gEdit ~~there does not seem to be a way to disable having a newline inserted at the end~~ see this answer.

For Vim (and gVim ) you can - by executing the following option: :set binary. Setting to binary will save the file as is and not insert a newline at the end of the document (Unless there already is one, in which it will be retained). At anytime you can revert this option with :set nobinary.

Nano is a little easier. You can launch nano with the -L flag (or --nonewlines if you're more the visual type). This will disable the automatic addition of the newline to the end of the file (so long as one was not actually entered). Ideally you could setup this alias in your ~/.bashrc: alias nano="nano -L", which would launch Nano with the no newlines flag included in it!

Since I don't know exactly what you're doing I'm going to point you to Why should files end with a newline? which may explain why they're there. In short some applications will fail if they don't find an EOL directly before the EOF

Ubuntu – Set text direction in gnome-shell

Gnome as all GTK application, its RTL switch comes from locale definition and it's tight coded. So you have to change to RTL locale/language. If that locale is not installed GUI will be flipped but text/labels/menu will fall-back to the original language (English in most cases) with warning message:

Gtk-WARNING **: Locale not supported by C library.
    Using the fallback 'C' locale.

As I know Chinese is direction independent, I suppose it is configured as LTR. So it is better to look pure RTL locales like Arabic, Hebrew, Persian ...

To change setting for Unity or Gnome Sessions/Desktop

To change global settings /etc/default/locale, Example (ar_DZ, Arabic_Algeria):
```
LANGUAGE=ar
LANG=ar_DZ.UTF-8
```
Need to logout
To change only user setting ~/.pam_environment
```
LANGUAGE=ar
LANG=ar_DZ.UTF-8
```
Need to logout

Another way, If you want to flip GUI or switch locale/language for just one application:

Open terminal Ctrl+Alt+t
Run it with LANG=ar_DZ.UTF-8 or LANGUAGE=ar_DZ.UTF-8, try both of them not all application use same env variable:
```
LANGUAGE=ar_DZ.UTF-8 evince
LANG=ar_DZ.UTF-8 okular
```

Qt applications have a separated RTL switch -reverse which could be used without language change. Example:

qv4l2 -reverse

Now, If your language is not English and you want to use RTL flipped interface with it. There is a trick, you may test it:

Generate new locale as variation of an RTL language, example:
```
sudo locale-gen ar_YY.UTF-8
sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales
```
Copy your language translation (of gettext) files to new locale folder. As example French.
```
sudo cp -r /usr/local/share/locale/fr /usr/local/share/locale/ar_YY
```
Not all application put their locales in /usr/local/share/locale/. If you face such case, you may look where all locale files:
```
locate /locale/fr
```

References:

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Text Editor – Stop Gedit, Gvim, Vim, Nano from Adding End-of-File Newline Character

Ubuntu – Set text direction in gnome-shell

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