Re: Emacs and GTK.

[Ken Raeburn]

"Jan D." <address@hidden> writes:
> My main interest however is getting GTK into emacs (or is it emacs
> into GTK?).  In the long term to turn emacs into a reusable component,
> like bonobo.  I said I could start in december, and here we are.

There are other people interested in this too.  The idea came up on
the Guile mailing list, while discussing the possibility of changing
Emacs to use Guile as (one of) its extension language(s).

It's also been suggested there that GTK could be used for all or part
of the UI, to replace the completely custom code Emacs has now -- or,
conversely, to make functionality available in Emacs available
elsewhere as well.  (As far as I know there's been no actual work done
in that area.)  And it's certainly crossed my mind that it would be
interesting to have an "Emacs module" that can be loaded into Guile
applications.

Why is this important?  There's already a guile-gtk interface package
people were talking about using for this.  If its API is at the right
level for adding GTK support in Emacs, it would be a shame to invent a
completely new interface when one already exists that may suffice.

It'll be a while before the Guile-Emacs stuff is ready for prime time,
so you won't simply be able to use the Scheme support directly right
now.  But you might want to look at guile-gtk, and if it's a good
interface, model the Emacs GTK code on it closely enough that we could
easily drop in guile-gtk later.  Or, if the guile-gtk API isn't
suitable, you could write up some comments on why, so that someone
doesn't blindly try to do the conversion later without fixing whatever
problems you see.

I must say, though, that I have never really looked closely at GTK or
guile-gtk myself, and can't give you any specific advice in those
areas...

(Of course, I'm just guessing that you're thinking about making the
GTK interface directly useable from Lisp, rather than burying it under
the existing API.  If you're planning to do the latter, this guile-gtk
stuff won't matter much anyways.)

Ken

P.S.  Alex Schroeder suggested on the guile-devel list that we should
aim to make -- well, maybe it's a little early for that.  We Guile and
GTK users can dream about making the Emacs 22 "big project" be
Guile/GTK reusable components.... :-)