Re: Platform independent graphical display for Emacs

[Po Lu]

xenodasein--- via "Emacs development discussions." <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
writes:

> I grepped a bit, and there many conditional modifications to frame
> related functions through #ifdef USE_GTK.  This doesn't bode well for
> a cross-platform frame logic, IMO.  Is this what you referred to as
> problematic?

That's only the tip of the iceberg, but is completely unrelated to event
handling, where the relevant conditional is `HAVE_GLIB'.

The problem could be easily resolved if the GTK+ developers actually
paid attention to our reasonable requests, but they refuse to do so
because Emacs is, in their opinion, not a well-behaved program.

Case in point: the nearly 20-year old GTK bug where GTK aborts when a
display is closed.  We used to longjmp out, but that used to cause GLib
to emit a large amount of warnings, so that workaround was turned off,
and doesn't work nowadays either.

Another case in point: try resizing or creating a frame on a GTK build
that is smaller than its menu bar, see what GTK does to it, and compare
that behaviour (which cannot be turned off, at least when I tried) to
the behaviour under an Xt or no-toolkit build.

Then of course, there are the many other instances where the GTK
developers refused to implement a basic feature, such as the ability to
adjust the thumb size of a scrollbar, because they did not think it fit
with their idea of how a program should behave appearance-wise.