---
layout: post.html
title: Mirroring Awareness
date-written: 26 December 2023
---

Here is something that a lot of you may find interesting. I've posted about this on fedi roughly a year ago.

A lot of languages are read from left to right. However, some are read from right to left (i.e. Arabic). To account for this, the operating systems often mirror their UI completely. Microsoft refers to this as "mirroring awareness", and it kinda reminds me of mirror mode in Mario Kart.

Operating systems often design their UI around the idea of starting your tasks from the left and finishing them from the right. That is why completely mirroring the UI is important for those that know a right-to-left language. Afaik, this has been a practice since Windows 98.

[Windows XP mirrored](../img/blog/mirroring-awareness/winxp.jpg)

[Windows 7 mirrored](../img/blog/mirroring-awareness/win7.jpg)

Even Windows 11 does this. However, not every app supports it.

[Windows 11 mirrored](../img/blog/mirroring-awareness/win11.png)

Windows is not the only operating system to do this either. This practice has also been adopted by macOS, GNOME, and KDE Plasma.

[macOS mirrored](../img/blog/mirroring-awareness/macos.png)

[GNOME mirrored](../img/blog/mirroring-awareness/gnome.png)

[Plasma mirrored](../img/blog/mirroring-awareness/plasma.jpg)
