Re: "Why is emacs so square?"

[chad]

For the original poster, because they might be used to running primarily a distribution-installed version of emacs: the code for unix-based GUIs has supported a variety of these sorts of elements for a very long time, depending (currently) on whether you build emacs with the Athena, Lucid, Motif, Athena3D, or gtk[,2,3] toolkits. Under macOS, one has the ns and mac ports, and under MS Windows, it uses the local gui toolkit (which I believe is the core W32 look and feel, not the frequently-shifting WPF, Windows Forms, Metro, UWP, etc. standards).  Even within these systems, there are options inside emacs for giving buttons a 3D look or not, and there are many packages that add icons to emacs' display (via fonts, as far as I can tell) that can 'spiffy up' emacs considerably. 

It would probably be helpful for emacs' adoption if some of these gui enhancements could be added to emacs and/or ELPA more directly. To be specific, it would perhaps be helpful for emacs new-user adoption if people didn't feel the need to adopt a large integrated package like Spacemacs or DOOM emacs just to get graphical niceties -- not because those bundles are bad, but because they add a *lot* more than just the gui enhancements. The past couple years has seen a bit of an explosion of packages like better-defaults or "starter kits" that aim to improve the new-user experience without such a large overhead, but those still require getting emacs from somewhere other than GNU or the standard distrubutions, which is an extra hurdle.

I would be happy to help with such an effort, but I'm unsure what sorts of changes would be acceptible to "core emacs", and I don't personally have anything major to add to the existing set of third-party starter kits or mega-bundles. If someone here had a clearer idea, that would be helpful. Maybe the first step is to try to get all-the-icons (https://github.com/domtronn/all-the-icons.el) or an analogous package included in emacs?

Hope that helps! Thanks,

~Chad

On Wed, Apr 15, 2020 at 10:16 AM Dmitry Gutov <address@hidden> wrote:

On 15.04.2020 17:31, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> I think the difficulty here is to look "contemporary" and yet fit every
>> platform Emacs is run on. Button widgets look different on each. Even
>> between GUI toolkits. And change between releases.
>
> There are only 2 variants: native buttons (provided by some toolkit)
> or the ones we draw ourselves.  And there's no requirement that they
> all look the same, I think: they should have the look-and-feel of the
> toolkit being used.

These are implementation options. But either the "ones we draw
ourselves" are designed to fit each platform, or they looks the same
across platforms, with our personal look.

The latter option is sometimes taken by professional applications in
which the user spends most of their time (e.g. Blender, or at least some
of it earlier versions that I've tried).

>> The other option, of course, is to look both modern and unique, but it's
>> a harder proposition, especially without a graphical designer on the
>> team. And this stuff gets outdated quickly.
>
> I think "modern and unique" is a contradiction of terms nowadays ;-)

In principle, I disagree. But it's difficult, and it's a balancing act,
of course, between having them look distinct and interesting, but still
familiar enough, and not too "tacky" (meaning, a design too exotic can
become an eyesore after a while). It's a problem that bigger companies
put whole design departments on.