Re: Emacs as a desktop environment

[Ulrich Mueller]

>>>>> On Wed, 25 May 2011, Ken Raeburn wrote:

> The GTK code is, apparently, rather poor at supporting multiple
> displays.  It'll work some of the time, but sometimes -- I forget;
> maybe when a display goes away unexpectedly -- it'll break.

If the connection is forcibly closed (e.g. when the X server is
terminated) then Emacs will crash. It's a bug in GTK+ that is open
since 2002:
<https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85715>

There are several bugs related to this in the Emacs bug tracker too,
for example <http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=4078>.

> I got the impression (that other people had gotten the impression)
> that it wasn't an issue that was getting much attention from the GTK
> folks.

There hasn't been much activity on the GTK+ bug in the last 5 years.
I really wonder why they aren't interested in fixing this.

>> How would you recommend compiling?

> I use "--with-x-toolkit=lucid", and haven't had any problems.

At Gentoo there were already discussions if we should change the
default toolkit of the Emacs package from GTK+ to Lucid, because of
this bug.

Ulrich