What textwrap does not take into account the width of characters is not the only problem. It also does not take into account combining characters and control codes. Implementing all this will significantly complicate the code and possibly should lie outside the standard library. Such large change obviously is new feature. I believe that we should first provide a common interface to determine the width of the line (issue12499) and allow to determine the appropriate algorithm at the application level. Also provide helper functions like in issue12568.