Re: Motif support

[Arthur Miller]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>
>> Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2021 08:58:29 +0100
>> Cc: Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es>, emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> 
>> In a way a repl is kind of similar to a game loop in that it reads input 
>> (read),
>> update the world (eval) and render the world (print). The other similarity is
>> that Emacs is also controlling it's loop rather than fitting into some
>> frameworks loop such as Gtk, or some other toolkits framework. You rather use
>> those as a library of functionality to draw things when they suit Emacs, 
>> while
>> desktop applications would usually fit into a framework and let toolkit do 
>> the
>> update and drawing when it needs to be done. GUI toolkits like Gtk are 
>> usually
>> "don't call us, we call you", while games, and I perecive Emacs, are rather, 
>> "do
>> this for me when I ask you".
>
> That difference is largely irrelevant in the context of this
> particular discussion, since we are specifically talking about drawing
> stuff, not about the framework or the main loop.

Well it is what it is about, how Emacs draw the world (or rather buffers). Since
Emacs uses toolkit in that fashion, and it already pretends that a gui window is
a text terminal (as D. Colascione put it in one old text he wrote), Emacs can as
well use it's own library functions to do the gui, and just use a (relatively)
tiny wrapper for os/hardware to implement that abstraction.

I suggested Cairo or gdk as such, but that does not seem to be popular for
different reasons you and Po mentioned, but there might be other ones already
written that could be suitable.

I have understanding that you hae implemented quite advanced text renderer at
least on X; I am not sure if you do same on win32 or Emacs uses built-in OS text
rendering on Windows. In that light, I wonder if Emacs even need 3rd party
abstraction and toolkits other than for, as you said in the beginning of the
thread, to fit into looks of the platform.