Re: Abysmal state of GTK build

[Po Lu]

Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> Most users don't choose the toolkits -- they use whatever the
> distribution has configured.  And since most of those use a variation on
> Gnome Shell, it's natural for the distributions to use the Gtk toolkit
> for Emacs.

Can't we shout at them to do something else? I've seen the Debian Emacs
packager here somewhere.

> But, yes, most people who build Emacs themselves end up using the Gtk
> toolkit for two reasons: It's the default, and the no-toolkit one is
> ugly and unusable (both in actuality and as a UX preference for most
> normal people).

Unusable?

> Did the distributions exist before Gtk?

Yes.  Emacs gained support for GTK+ in the early 2000s, and enabled it by
default with 23.1.

> I haven't tried the Lucid build in a while, and it fixes the menu
> scaling (and font) issues.

I think menu font scaling works fine on the Lucid build.  Scaling the
menus themselves (i.e. the border around highlighted menu items) most
likely does not, and I don't have the necessary hardware to test any
implementation of that type of scaling.  (If I did, we wouldn't even be
having this discussion right now -- I've repeatedly wanted to really fix
HiDPI support over the past several months.)