Improving the gtk2 port

[Pierre Chanial]

Hey,

first of all, congrats to the devs for the rejuvenating port of emacs to 
gtk2.
emacs is now a pleasure to use. The user experience is so much improved 
that I think the sentence "The next release will have many new features, 
but no one specific essential feature" in the Development & "Coming 
Soon" section is misleading.
We, at mozilla.org, are looking forwards really tight integrations with 
the OSes especially for Mozilla Firebird. For each port, we have a look 
and feel file 
(http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/widget/src/gtk2/nsLookAndFeel.cpp 
) and additional skin files. There's still a lot of work to make mozilla 
integrate gracefully in the Gnome desktop. Since we're doing the same 
job, let me share the most visible problems I've noticed. Don't get me 
wrong, I know that most of them can be tweaked via the pref file, but 
they should be resolved out of the box.
- vertical scrollbar should be on the right (for LTR, at least).
- background and foreground colors for the default font should be white 
and black.
- background and foreground colors of text selection should obey the 
system default (in moz, we have the background color right but not the 
foreground, we'll fix that).
- the text cursor should be like a |, not an filled rectangle. Its 
default color should be black and not pink.
- on the content area, even outside of the text, the mouse cursor should 
not be an arrow but a |--| rotated 90° and by no way pink but black.
- tooltips haven't the system background and foreground colors and 
should appear below the mouse pointer.
Given that I don't know the emacs codebase, I've tried to establish the 
above list to maximize the "user experience/work required" ratio but of 
course, there are other issues like antialiasing, default system fonts, 
writing a gtk2 pref panel similar to other gtk2/KDE apps, use of the gtk 
file integration of the info files with yelp, etc.
There's still another serious bug in emacs: the X selection isn't done 
right: I can't paste from emacs to another gkt2 app without using the 
mouse. Apparently, the PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD X selections are messed up.
See the guidelines followed by mozilla, Xemacs and GTK2 apps in
http://freedesktop.org/Standards/clipboards-spec/clipboards.txt for more 
info.
Thanks for the attention,
Pierre Chanial