Re: porting GNU Emacs to kde (?)

[Giannis Georgalis]

Hello Jan,

"Jan D." <address@hidden> writes:

> My motivation for doing the GTK port in the first place was to make
> Emacs a component that GNOME applications could use.  I don't like the
> current GNOME editors that exists.  Ditto for KDE by the way.  But I
> still

Yes. ALL other editors suck ;-).

> have other things on my TODO list that I would like to fix first, (some
> are GTK related, some not).  I do not know anything about GNUStep or
> KParts, but will of course help as much as I can and have time for.

There's no need to hurry. It should be a long term project. You don't
have to know anything about GNUstep or KParts (see bellow).

> I suspect however, that KParts rely heavily on KDE and Qt libraries, the
> same as GNOME components relies on GTK and GNOME libraries.
> It will be hard work to make Emacs a general component without linking
> in those libraries.  This should be investigated first.

I'm not saying we shouldn't link Emacs with KDE/Qt or
GNOME/Bonobo/ORBit libraries. What I'm saying is that we should study
the KTextEditor Interfaces, the GNOME Text Editor CORBA interfaces and
the GNUstep's text editor interfaces and finally come up with
independent interfaces that would be a superset of the above three
and implement them. Then, each specific implementation
(GNOME/KDE/GNUstep) will just implement some text editor lightweight
interfaces that will only delegate their functionality to the general
interface that should be common.

As for the port of the GUI components of Emacs, a general, toolkit
independent, interface that will be implemented seperately by
GNOME/KDE/GNUstep, should make the porting job easier. I suspect you
have done something like this through your efforts to port Emacs to
GTK, didn't you ?

Please, tell me if I'm missing / oversimplifying / misunderstood
something.

Thank you,
Giannis

-- 
 Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad 
idea which could only have originated in California.
    - Edsger Dijkstra (attributed)