Re: What improvements would be truly useful?

[Daniel Colascione]

On 03/06/2018 08:52 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > From: Daniele Nicolodi <address@hidden>
> > Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2018 23:32:28 -0700
> >
> > I'm far from being familiar with the Emacs codebase thus I may be
> > reporting something that it is not completely true, however: Emacs was
> > born as a console only application, the graphical user interface seems
> > to be duct taped on.
>
> I object to the "duct taped" derogation, and invite you to study the
> relevant code before you form your opinions.  Besides, Emacs still
> supports text-mode terminals, and moreover, supports text-mode and GUI
> frames in the same session (a very important feature), so some degree
> of compatibility to a console is still a requirement.
>
> > Also, GTK support seems a bit of an hack that
> > requires layering violations (reaching down to the X primitives) to
> > work.  Being GTK the only modern toolkit supported on Linux (as far as I
> > know) and the only way to get nartive Wayland support, some radical
> > cleanup in that area would probably be a good thing.
>
> It's true that GTK support was added in a not very clean way, but I
> don't think we can throw away support for the other toolkits just yet,
> because they are still being used.

Eli is right. The current approach is fine, however it got there.

Eventually, we'll have to support Wayland, but I disagree that "radical 
cleanups" will necessarily be needed. As I wrote a while ago, the right 
way forward is a pure GTK+ (as opposed to a mixed X11/GTK+) back-end, 
letting GTK+ handle running on Wayland, and this kind of window system 
could be most accommodated in the existing model. It'll end up looking a 
lot like the NS port.

More radical, I think, would be multiple-window-system support. For 
that, more abstraction in the frame rendering will be required.