Re: Rethinking the design of xwidgets

[Akira Kyle]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2020 at 01:24 PM, Mingde (Matthew) Zeng 
<matthewzmd@posteo.net> wrote:

> You might've already tried it (since you mentioned in the main 
> thread), but I still want to point out that currently the Emacs 
> Application Framework's PDF-viewer [1] is probably your go-to 
> choice (for now) for best PDF rendering in emacs, as it uses 
> muPDF in the shadow.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem like it doesn't currently support 
setting slices, inverting the pdf colors, or synctex.

> As the maintainer of the EAF project, I have to point out that 
> the original motivation for the existence of EAF was to enhance 
> Emacs browser rendering, pdf rendering, and video rendering 
> capabilites. The QGraphicsView was designed to span over the 
> entire buffer to make it more emacsy, to fit the "one buffer, 
> one major mode" idea. The choice was obvious when using EAF to 
> view modern webpages, PDF, or videos. However EAF _doesn't have 
> to_ stay this way, it is completely viable to embed the 
> QGraphicsView inside a buffer.

It's not clear to me how one would go about doing that? There's 
the fact that Qt is C++ based and that AFAIU it relies on the 
window manager to behave properly in order to be placed in the 
right place.


> I don't completely understand your opinion on why EAF is not 
> very emacsy, I can see why it's not lispsy, but EAF is 
> keyboard-oriented, highly extensible and customizable. It just 
> didn't improve Emacs itself but decided to utilize other free 
> software. The author of EAF, manateelazycat, thought that it 
> would take quite a long time for Emacs to improve its graphical 
> capabilites of rendering webpages or videos to the point of 
> other modern software dedicated for these functionalities, and 
> emacs-devel should prioritize on making Emacs a better 
> text-based editing environment, then the EAF's job is simply 
> extending Emacs to the world of modern graphics.

IMO the majority of what makes Emacs emacsy is being lispy, not 
necessarily that its keyboard-oriented. But yes I grant that EAF 
looks to be quite extensible.

I'm not a huge fan of Qt or C++ which has caused me to shy away 
from EAF. Also correct me if wrong, but it doesn't look like EAF 
has a path forward to running on wayland.

> Nevertheless, I'm very interested to see how this xwidgets idea 
> evolves.

Thanks, I really hope it ends up going somewhere.