Re: Emacs and Gnome Canvas

[Óscar Fuentes]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

[snip]

Thanks Eli and Jan for your comments.

>From your discussion it seems that the only serious "problem" with Emacs
and Gnome's canvas (or any other canvas) is coupling the Emacs display
system with it. AFAIK the display system have evolved from the tty one
by incremental updates, which makes it very complex and hard to
maintain. My plan is radical: bypass the current Emacs display system
and implement a new one on top of the canvas. This would be purely
event-driven, hopefully with very little special cases for the platforms
where Emacs runs, and substantially simpler because the canvas would
take care of the low level chores.

On the long term, this could allow to remove the GUI code from the current
display system and left the tty code alone.

If the display system is decoupled from the buffer-handling code, the
high-level event system (Elisp hooks, etc) and the rest of Emacs in
general, it could be doable with a reasonable amount of work for a
single developer. Maybe I'm being too optimistic.