I know that correctly handling all Unicode scripts, including CJK, Hebrew,
Arabic, Indic are a much more complicated story and it's way beyond the
scope of kernel. I don't even know whether there's any graphical user-space
application handling all these issues perfectly. So I really don't want to
address them.
I'd like only one small modification: the cursor to jump two columns for CJK
characters instead of just one. (Either two FFFD's, or rather an FFFD
followed by a space printed.) This would allow you to edit English words
within a mixed CJK-English text file. As my experiences show, such a minor
change in the terminal driver would solve cursor aligning issues in *many*
cases. With this change the console would still be very-very far from being
perfect, it just would be simply better in practice.
Are you still definitely against this change? I see no drawbacks this could
cause, while it would make the console better in some circumstances. I think
this is just a small step towards a better console driver.