Re: Platform independent graphical display for Emacs

[Óscar Fuentes]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> 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.
>
> Isn't that so on other platforms as well?

Sure.

> Wherever Emacs invented its own UI, that UI and its widgets will
> always be different from the platform standards.

Yes, so deviating a bit more from the platform's UI shouldn't be a
problem as long as it provides some advantage.

>> It seems that the only elements which are "native" in the MS-Windows
>> port are the menu and the dialogs.
>
> And the scroll bars.

Yep, forgot those. Maybe because I use different versions of MS-Windows
and the scroll bars look different on each.

> And the frame decorations.

The frame decorations usually are provided by the Window Manager, they
are not something which are under Emacs' control (although MS-Windows
allows to change them to a large extent, other systems do not.)

> Is that different from other toolkits?  OK, so with GTK we also use
> their tool bar and tooltips (and get to live with their limitations),
> but other than that?
>
>> 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.
>
> That's an exaggeration.

Well, that's your opinion about my perception ;-) I still remember very
well when I learned Emacs 20 years ago. It was otherworldly to me.
Neither then (when I was using MS-Windows only) nor now (when I'm
primarly a GNU/Linux user) there is anything that is vaguely similar to
Emacs on the set of applications used by the people I know.

>> 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.)
>
> That's an "ad absurdum" kind of argument.
>
> In general, Emacs does do some (quite a few) thing differently, and
> where it does, it does so uniformly on all platforms, more or less (I
> think NS is the largest outlier here, with its Cmd key).  But this is
> a tangent: we weren't discussing the entire UI and its conventions, we
> only discussed the GUI aspects of the Emacs appearance.

I'm discussing the GUI too, but both the xenodasein and me are not
concerned with putting some lipstick on top of current Emacs GUI. IIUC
the change he is proposing is directed towards simplyfing the GUI code
*and* expanding what we can show, which would set the basis for a whole
lot of new features.