Re: What improvements would be truly useful?

[Daniele Nicolodi]

On 06/03/2018 09:52, 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.

I didn't intend "duct taped" as derogatory.  I meant to say that it has
been added in a way that works and is effective, but it is not elegant
or nice to look at.  I'm an experimental physicist and all complex
experiments have some literal duct tape solution that makes them work,
that was often supposed to be a quick fix to get things going, and that
ends to survive generations of PhD students.

>> 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.

I don't think that cleaning up the GTK support requires removing support
for any other toolkit, and I'm far from suggesting something like that.

Cheers,
Dan