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From: | Daniel Colascione |
Subject: | Can we go GTK-only? |
Date: | Thu, 27 Oct 2016 12:54:39 -0700 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/45.3.0 |
Do we really need all the legacy infrastructure in xterm? Do many people really build Emacs as a Motif application? The X window subsystem would be made much simpler if we made it GTK3-only.
If we did, much of the complexity of the existing code would evaporate, since we'd be using GTK's infrastructure instead of our own. We'd turn Emacs frames into well-behaved GTK widgets --- just run redisplay inside the Emacs-widget's draw method, draw onto the Cairo surface GTK provides. Instead of flushing frames and drawing to the screen directly from input-waiting routines, we'd rely exclusively on dirtying the Emacs widget and letting the GTK's normal Expose-event processing take care of invoking redisplay.
We'd have to get rid of the SIGIO input subsystem too, but I think that's a good thing.
The size of the xterm codebase would shrink by at least two thirds, I think. We already _have_ Cairo support: sure, it's broken, but the part that's broken is integrating with the horrible Xt hacks, not the drawing itself.
As a stepping stone, we should at least remove support for the no-toolkit, Motif, and Athena configurations. (Lucid I can understand.)
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