Re: New Emacs with GTK!

[Niels Freimann]

Dear Lucien,

I do not subscribe to any claim about a renaissance of the text 
console. Nevertheless if you and others persist on an ncurses
emacs then why not splitting emacs into gtk and ncurses 
applications, sharing display unrelated code via libraries, and 
removing all the motif, .., code forever ?

This would reduce code drastically, making the sources easier 
to understand, finding more support under the younsters
who are familiar with concepts like MVC.

However one thing must be clear: Any future development
must place gtk into the very center. emacs must become fully 
compatible with modern desktop environments. It must provide
all the dialogs known to the people by other GUI programs, and 
any relicts of the text mode past must disappear. Emacs must 
look and feel like any other gnome, kde, or window, application. 

Normally I do not argue phlilosophically, but today I break
this rule. I think that the destination of emacs always was 
towards the future. Richard written it with the future in his 
mind when others,  mesmerized by past resource limitations,
written text editors for terminals connected by very slow modems. 
When I started using emacs, most people still refused using 
it because the "eight megabytes and constantly swapping monster
is too much futuristic". Making plans for emacs future in the year 
2003 with ncurses in mind, would fail the destination of emacs.To 
be polemical: our competition isn't vms or something, but 
M$ windows. 

Nobody should feel offended by my harsh words. I am now
almost 50 years old, and love emacs very much. I am not
interested to experience a future death of emacs as an 
backward oriented dinosaur. If emacs will die one day, then it 
should die proud as an project which always was one step 
farther in the future than its competition. I hope you'll understand 
that.

On Sunday 23 March 2003 15:17, A.L.Meyers wrote:
> Don't be so sure, Niels
>
> The text console is alive and thriving, e. g. with the frame buffer
> device, which may lead to a renaissance of the text console
>
> Long live the text console!
>
> Lucien