Re: Successfully merged projects

[John W. Eaton]

On 11-Apr-2011, John Swensen wrote:

| I think it will be next to impossible to embed Emacs in a
| QDockWidget.  This means that the editor component cannot be docked
| to the rest of the IDE.  This also means that if I can't arrange the
| editor and command terminal in the IDE the way I like, as shown at
| the following link http://imgur.com/3sFrS
| 
| I could place Emacs over the top of the IDE window, but then I have
| to keep switching back and forth between two different windows.
| Even if we did devise some sort of interprocess communications
| between the IDE and Emacs, then when breakpoints are hit or an error
| occurs and you have it set to debug errors, you have to deal with
| focus issues for two different applications.  Like I said before,
| the IDE will probably not be used by advanced Octave users.

It seems like we had this discussion once before, but I can't remember
for sure.  It is apparently possible to embed Emacs now, at least with
X11:

  http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsXembed

Yes, I know, this won't work on Windows.  But I don't see why it
wouldn't be possible to do something similar to make Emacs work like
some kind of edit widget for the Windows (or any other) GUI
environment.

| The other option is to expect people to change their workflow to
| accommodate the choice of editor (which you alluded to in your email
| about turning Emacs into the IDE with friendlier keybindings). I am
| against this options, but maybe I don't have a say ;)

I'm not saying use Emacs as the GUI.

I meant that people often say that Emacs is somehow hard to use.  I
don't understand that, since if you start Emacs and start typing,
characters appear in the text window.  How hard is that?  Arrow keys
work for moving text around.  You can select regions with the mouse,
etc.  Some of the keybindings are not familiar to people used to
Windows editing commands, but those are configurable.  So I'm just
saying that if you popped up Emacs with the right keybindings and
window decoration, they would wouldn't have any problem using Emacs.

jwe