Re: Platform independent graphical display for Emacs

[Óscar Fuentes]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> 1: What is "platform-native" varies with each new major release of GTK
>>    and Windows.
>
> But it changes for all the GUI applications, not just for Emacs.

Which means that they value consistency with other applications that
follow the platform standard.

However, Emacs is already largely deviant from the platform's UI. On
MS-Windows, things like customize-variable shows an interface which has
nothing to do with the platform's standard GUI widgets. It seems that
the only elements which are "native" in the MS-Windows port are the menu
and the dialogs.

If we add to that that Emacs has its own way of doing things (M-x
command system, interaction through the minibuffer instead of dialogs,
different keyboard shorcuts for standard actions like cut&paste, etc.)
we could conclude that Emacs already is very alien to
MS-Windows/GTK/MacOS UI standards.

So I can hardly imagine a typical Emacs user that could make a big issue
about the menus or dialogs being a bit different from what his
platform's standard ones are, as long as the replacement is not ugly
("ugly" in the sense the motif menu is ugly compared to Lucid and GTK.)