Re: Improving the gtk2 port

[Jan D.]

> - vertical scrollbar should be on the right (for LTR, at least).
> - background and foreground colors for the default font should be 
> white and black.

They are.  But if you are running Emacs on some GNU/Linux distribution
like RedHat, they may have (well, RedHat and Mandrake i know have) 
installed
some system wide Emacs customizations that change this.

> - background and foreground colors of text selection should obey the 
> system default (in moz, we have the background color right but not the 
> foreground, we'll fix that).
> - the text cursor should be like a |, not an filled rectangle. Its 
> default color should be black and not pink.

I totally agree with Miles Bader, this is no good, even in Mozilla.

> - on the content area, even outside of the text, the mouse cursor 
> should not be an arrow but a |--| rotated 90° and by no way pink but 
> black.
> - tooltips haven't the system background and foreground colors and 
> should appear below the mouse pointer.

All of these points really is the difference of using Emacs default,
which predates GTK.  Scrollbar to the left, different tooltip colours,
text selection colours, e.t.c. are all done the Emacs way.

> Given that I don't know the emacs codebase, I've tried to establish 
> the above list to maximize the "user experience/work required" ratio 
> but of course, there are other issues like antialiasing, default 
> system fonts, writing a gtk2 pref panel similar to other gtk2/KDE 
> apps, use of the gtk file integration of the info files with yelp, 
> etc.

Antialiasing is being worked upon as I recall.  I do not think a gtk2 
pref
panel is feasible for Emacs.  Emacs is much more complex than the 
average
GTK application in this regard.  Maybe the current preference "panel"
(i.e. customize), could be given a more specific GTK look when Emacs
is compiled for GTK.  I don't know what yelp is.

> There's still another serious bug in emacs: the X selection isn't done 
> right: I can't paste from emacs to another gkt2 app without using the 
> mouse. Apparently, the PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD X selections are messed 
> up.
> See the guidelines followed by mozilla, Xemacs and GTK2 apps in
> http://freedesktop.org/Standards/clipboards-spec/clipboards.txt for 
> more info.

I'll look in to it.


Most of the points you bring up is Emacs using its own look and feel
that is consistent regardles of what port of Emacs you may be
running (i.e. GTK, Motif/Lesstif, Lucid, etc), versus using GTK 
defaults.
Technically I don't see any problem with using GTK defaults when 
compiled
with GTK (the colours, scrollbar on the left, the cursors), but it also
impacts on the consistens of Emacs and the feasability of using the
same Emacs configuration across different Emacs ports.  This is for
someone else to decide.  I presonally like Emacs to use the same 
colours,
cursors and so on, on different Emacs ports.

        Jan D.