Re: Unify the Platforms: Cairo+FreeType+Harfbuzz Everywhere (except TTY)

[Arthur Miller]

Julius Pfrommer <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi all,
>
> during the recent discussion on "Emacs being too square", I recalled a
> few projects that use OpenGL for terminal emulators [1,2]. With good
> performance, smooth scrolling and the possibility to add more visual
> *bling*.
>
> I had a good look at Emacs' code-base to see if similar approaches
> could be used. As you can imagine, I got lost in a forest of #ifdef for
> different platforms and GUI toolkits. The code looks scary to touch. If
> you don't have access to *all supported platform*, it is likely that
> changes break a platform you could not test locally.

I have been looking into same, some time ago and recently, and I
experience same problem. A forest of cases, all coded into same place in
giant files of 5K+ lines :-).

> To make the code-base less scary, there should be more code-sharing
> across GUI platforms. And this is indeed possible!
Emacs and Emacs src could benefit of some modularization and refactoring
definitely.