Right-to-left GUI in pretest

Right-to-left GUI in pretest

[Per Starbäck]

Using a locale with right-to-left writing, for example

  LANG=ar_EG.utf8 src/emacs-24.0.93.1

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.

If emacs was localized with non-English menus this would be good, but
since these things are in English anyway I think it only looks
strange.
(Also the mirroring affects the meanings of the values left and right
for tool-bar-position.)

Re: Right-to-left GUI in pretest

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 15 Feb 2012 15:08:33 +0100
> From: Per Starbäck <per@starback.se>
> 
> Using a locale with right-to-left writing, for example
> 
>   LANG=ar_EG.utf8 src/emacs-24.0.93.1
> 
> 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.

Indeed.  I hope there's some GTK setting that disables this, and that
some GTK guru (which I'm not) will tell you how to do that.

> If emacs was localized with non-English menus this would be good, but
> since these things are in English anyway I think it only looks
> strange.

That's exactly the reason why Emacs does not yet allow to reverse the
menu bar, the tool bar, and the mode line.  I deliberately didn't code
that because it makes no sense when the menus and tool-bar buttons
cannot be localized.  There are comments in the code documenting this
decision.

That GTK does it on its own is not something Emacs can control.
Sorry.

Jan, can you help?

Re: [SPG,spf=20]Re: Right-to-left GUI in pretest

[Per Starbäck]

> Indeed.  I hope there's some GTK setting that disables this, and that
> some GTK guru (which I'm not) will tell you how to do that.

I think nothing more happened with this. I think it would be really
great if this could be fixed for 24,
since it's very obvious and disturbing for those who will be affected
by this bug. It's my fault for not
reporting it properly as a bug. Now I have: bug #11016.