BICON(1)

📦 version 0.5, in fedora 43, fedora 44, nixos 26.05, nixpkgs unstable

💖 BICON(1) — bestie edition 💖

the bicon page from the General Commands Manual 🎀 no cap, this one's for my bidi girlies

✨ NAME ✨

bicon — a bidirectional console. yes literally. the console that does both directions. 💅

🌈 SYNOPSIS 🌈

bicon [isocode] [command [arguments...]]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

Okay so listen. bicon is a console program that supports bidirectional text display — that's for languages like Arabic, Persian and Hebrew. 🫶

The way that bicon works is it calls bicon.bin(1) to do the real bidi/joining conversion, after it loads a suitable keymap and font. so bicon is the main character doing the setup, and bicon.bin is the one actually doing the conversion. iconic teamwork fr fr. 👑

And while you're in bicon you can switch between Arabic and English, or between Persian and English, using the Alt-Shift key combination. that's it, that's the vibe check. ✨

💅 OPTIONS 💅

  • isocode — the two letter ISO country code, in small letters (lowercase bestie, don't come at me with caps 🙈). If you leave it empty, the derived value from the LANG variable is used instead.
  • command — gets executed by bicon after it loads. If you omit it, bicon uses the current SHELL, or /bin/sh if SHELL is undefined.
  • arguments — are passed to the command to run. like, straight to it. no detours. 🍓

🌸 ENVIRONMENT 🌸

The following environment variables are utilized by bicon:

  • SHELL — if the variable SHELL exists, the shell forked by bicon will be that shell. If SHELL is not set, the Bourne shell is assumed. (Most shells set this variable automatically, so like, don't stress 🫶).
  • LANG — if isocode is not passed to bicon, it will examine LANG to determine the desired language. it's doing detective work for you, lowkey 🔥
  • TERM — variable TERM is examined in case to determine how to set the keymap and font. Recognized values are linux and xterm currently. that's the whole list bestie, don't try to sneak anything else in 💀
  • DISPLAY — if the value of TERM is xterm, then DISPLAY is examined by bicon to find the X server to contant to load the keymap. (yes, "contant" — that's what the page says, I'm not fixing it, it's iconic ✨)

⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

bicon.bin(1), unicode_start(1), unicode_stop(1), loadkeys(1), dumpkeys(1), kbd_mode(1), setfont(8), setxkbmap(1), xkbcomp(1).

go read them. iykyk. 📚

💜 AUTHOR 💜

This manual page was written by Muhammad Alkarouri, of the Arabeyes project. shoutout, absolute legend. 🎀

😭 REPORTING BUGS 😭

Please report bugs at http://bugs.arabeyes.org/cgi-bin/bugzilla/enter_bug.cgi?product=BiCon.

found a bug? bestie, tell them, not me. I'm just the messenger 💖

Copyright © 2004 Arabeyes Project. This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

no warranty bestie. NONE. not even the implied ones. it's giving "you're on your own" but affectionately 💀🫶

and that's the whole page! this lil manual was living its best life back on March 28, 2004, and it's part of the General Commands Manual — bicon(1), forever iconic. mwah 💅✨

📦 where this page comes from