Re: Introducing emacs-webkit and more thoughts on Emacs rendering (was Rethinking the design of xwidgets)

[Tomas Hlavaty]

On Sun 29 Nov 2020 at 20:54, Akira Kyle <akira@akirakyle.com> wrote:
> However I think designing such a feature should keep eventual
> integration with modules in mind. Especially since in general graphics
> is very performance sensitive and so doing some drawing in elisp just
> might not cut it and many interesting applications of such a feature
> would require interfacing with an external c library.

Not necessarily.

There could also be a specialized program which could handle drawing.
In fact there already is such a program: w3mimgdisplay and is part of
the w3m web browser and pager.  It is also used in the file manager
ranger.  It works both with or without X.  I am using it in
emacs-framebuffer too to display images and documents in Emacs.

The issues I am facing have nothing to do with modules or libraries.

For example:

It would be more convenient, if there was a way to specify elisp
function to draw an image.  By default, it could just call the existing
C code but this would also allow me to specify a different elisp
function which would then for example call w3mimgdisplay.

It would be more convenient, if an image was represented as elisp data
instead of C data.  iirc there is no way to add new image types without
touching C.

Is there a way to turn off cursor for a buffer?  (Blinking cursor
disrupts the drawn image.)

Is there a way run a function after emacs changes something on the
screen in a buffer?