Some things you might find of interest

[kovidgoyal]

The text sizing protocol allows applications to control how many cells text is
rendered in, fixing the width issue robustly:
https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/text-sizing-protocol/#fixing-the-character-width-issue-for-the-terminal-ecosystem

Possibly you already know this but I didnt see mention of it in your blog post.

There is ongoing work to define a robust algorithm for how terminals map
unicode to a fixed width grid, you might wish to participate in that
discussion:
kovidgoyal/kitty#8533

Finally, I wrote a tool to test terminal compliance with the spec outlined
above, it uses grapheme segmentation test data from the unicode consortium,
discussed in the issue linked above, you can run it for yourself with:

kitten __width_test__

[jquast]

Thank you for reading and responding, I only just discovered your text sizing protocol last week, so I haven't any constructive comments to make yet except that I agree that it is important and to thank you directly for giving it attention. I look forward to making experiments and I'll share any constructive feedback in kitty's issues.

I'll be sure to look into __width_test__, maybe I can incorporate similar testing methods into ucs-detect.

But just to say again, I've been suggesting the need of variable width feature for terminals and that is why I closed my article by mentioning this promising standard. I previously commented,

As for these kinds of scripts (Arabic in this case), fixed-width fonts and monospace constraints of a terminal is not appropriate. We can only do so much to interpret unicode.org specifications for the terminal environment, but measuring this kind of script isn't possible with the data files that they publish[..]

Aside, I do wish for there to be a terminal sequence to display variable-width fonts and be released from the constraints of monospacing for such languages. Such a sequence could be used or detected at the application level to assume that the position is indeterminate, and rely on "cursor position report" queries for only an approximation of the nearest current cell.