Re: Emacs as browser (was Re: Concurrency, again)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2016 11:15:27 -0400
> From: "Perry E. Metzger" <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden,
>  address@hidden, address@hidden
> 
> (There are four front ends now, right? MS Windows, X, NextStep and
> tty, yes?)

Yes.  Although the TTY back-end has some quirks in the MS-Windows
build, because termcap/terminfo is not supported by the Windows
console (or wasn't until Windows 10.1).

> Is there any documentation about the internal interfaces between the
> terminal layer and the back end?

Look at 'struct redisplay_interface' (for X it gets populated around
line 12470 of xterm.c) and at hooks in 'struct terminal' (populated
for X in x_create_terminal).  TTYs don't have 'struct
redisplay_interface' (for historical reasons), but instead call the
corresponding functions directly.

> I doubt I'm skilled enough in something like Wayland to do this work
> but I'd like to get a bit of a sense of how awful the work is.

Thanks for trying.

> And what *did* happen to the Cairo stuff?

I has bugs that we cannot fix because no one knowns enough about Cairo
drawing.  The person who wrote the code left the Emacs development
short time after merging the code.

> Cairo would make Wayland easy if I recall correctly.

That was the idea behind introducing it.

> > IMO, working on that is much more important for the future of Emacs
> > than any other improvements, including, but not limited to, the
> > "future of Emacs Lisp" discussions, the "feature/integrated-elpa"
> > discussions, etc.  Developing Emacs without first-class experts on X
> > on board makes no sense to me.
> 
> Perhaps no first class experts in the area are aware that Emacs needs
> the help?

Perhaps.