Re: Carbon port and multi-tty

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: David Kastrup <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden
> Date: Wed, 07 May 2008 12:51:36 +0200
> 
> As an example: I seem to remember that you gave the MSDOS port a
> text-mode CUA-like menu behavior and look, whereas this does not hold
> true for text-mode on other operating systems (where tmm-mode is almost
> universally despised).

You have your history backwards: the MSDOS menu support was coded
_before_ tmm was made part of Emacs.  Back when menus were added to
the MSDOS port, the text-mode Emacs would only _show_ the menu bar,
but you couldn't get to it nor invoke the menus in any way.  The only
platform with menus back then was X11, which is why the menu support
in msdos.c is an emulation of the Xlib functions.

> I am not even sure there is any remaining user of MSDOS Emacs.

There were lots of them back when I actually was working on the MSDOS
port.  There was a whole project, called DJGPP, which ported a whole
lot of GNU packages (see http://www.delorie.com/djgpp, if you are
interested), and the DOS port of Emacs was an important part of it.
I'm talking about 1992-1998 time frame, when GNU/Linux was in diapers
and unsuitable for general public, and every other platform besides
DOS/Windows was expensive and of course proprietary.  NTEmacs just
began to be barely available, could only be compiled by a proprietary
compiler, and at first lacked the GUI features it has now.  The DOS
port of Emacs (and the rest of DJGPP) was used on both plain DOS and
on Windows back then, and its support for menus, mouse, clipboard, and
long file names made it suitable for quite an audience.

> So how does it make you a better person if you focus on supporting something
> which nobody seems to care about, anyway?

Well, nowadays, when ``nobody cares about'' DOS, I don't work on the
DOS port, either.  Check out the logs, and you will see where most of
my (admittedly, minimal) free time is invested in Emacs.

> I am not in a position to direct your efforts elsewhere, and indeed I
> use text mode rarely enough nowadays that it would make much of a
> difference for myself.  There are users that still prefer text
> terminals, though.  But then the MSDOS code presumably is there, and if
> somebody was _really_ agitated about it, he could attempt a port.  It
> may be a wart, but it is not like it is a fresh one...

Some of the code and experience gained by the DOS port _was_ brought
to the text-mode Emacs: the whole color-mapping feature, the one that
transparently and automatically finds a suitable text color when some
Lisp requests something like "BurlyWood" (see tty-colors.el), was a
reimplementation of color mapping developed for the MSDOS port, when
it was the only text-mode platform that supported colors.  Before
that, unless one of 8 ANSI colors supported by a terminal was
requested, Emacs would simply fall back on the default color, which
made many features dysfunctional.

I'm sorry I no longer have time to port the menus to the text-mode
terminal, but we don't always control what happens in our lives.  I'm
even more sorry that I cannot finish the bidi iterator for Emacs
display engine: I think it's much more important than text-mode menus.

Anyway, I hope this wasn't just about my personal contribution, but
about being kinder and more cooperative, even if you don't always get
the same measure in response.