Emacs and GTK.

[Jan D.]

Hello.

My name is Jan Djärv (swedish).  Richard Stallman asked me a while back 
if I could help out with emacs, bugs or new features.  I responded that 
I would be glad to, I use emacs daily.  As for bugs, I haven't had much 
time, my employer actually expects me to do work (imagine that!).

My main interest however is getting GTK into emacs (or is it emacs into 
GTK?).  In the long term to turn emacs into a reusable component, like 
bonobo.  I said I could start in december, and here we are.

I have looked at it now, and I got the file selector window done at 
least (probably the easiest task :-).

It looks like more work than I initially thought, but it will take the 
time it takes.  I was thinking of getting GTK in the same way as Motif 
is in emacs, but since GTK does not use Xt, and really insists on doing 
everything its own way, that is out.  GTK really requires it's own event 
loop for instance.

So, I'd appreciate any input.  For example, have any of looked at the 
problem and have any thoughts?  Or perhaps you already have started on 
it, or are done :-).

I'm also kind of worried that I will have to duplicate lots of X things 
into GTK things, and that this will be hard(er) to maintain.

I haven't looked at XEmacs, but I understand they have some GTK support. 
 Is it OK to look what they have done?  Or are they so different that 
it is of little use?  I also hear that they have support for creating 
GTK widgets from elisp, but I wasn't planning on doing that.

I haven't done much "serious" GTK programming, but I am experienced in 
Motif.  There are similar stuff in both, but somethings differ very much 
(laying out of widgets for example).  Part of my interest is of course 
to get to learn GTK better.  It seems to be the way to go.  I've been 
doing C/C++ programming for 13 years (how time flies :-), so I think I 
got that part under control.

Well, thats about it.  Any thoughts, pointers, ideas, suggestions you 
might have are most welcome.  Just remember to Cc me, as I am not on 
this list.

Thanks,

        Jan D.