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

[Akira Kyle]

On Tue, Dec 01, 2020 at 12:44 AM, Tomas Hlavaty <tom@logand.com> 
wrote:

> On Mon 30 Nov 2020 at 10:03, Akira Kyle <akira@akirakyle.com> 
> wrote:
> > and because I see pgtk as the future of Emacs on GNU/Linux 
> > systems as
> > X becomes increasingly obsolete.
>
> I am not sure such future is bright.
>
> In that future, is there no way to do graphics without a widget 
> toolkit?

Sure there is. Under wayland you can just dump pixels into a 
shared buffer to render them to the screen or use EGL to render 
using a GPU. The difference from X is that wayland offers no 
convince functions to actually draw pixels into such a buffer, its 
up to the client to do so. In order to not reinvent the wheel, its 
much more convenient to use a toolkit to draw the elements it's 
good at drawing. 

> > AFAIU the pgtk version, like the ns version it was modeled 
> > after, 
> > doesn't implement everything in the main frame area of Emacs as 
> > widgets, only the tool and menu bars are implemented as proper 
> > widgets.
>
> Also popup menus that pop up on a mouse click are gtk iirc.
>
> And maybe scrollbars?
>
> It may have changed since I turned these distractions off a long 
> time
> ago.

I think this is really ultimately a personal preference.

> I think that they are also fundamentally flawed: How can I 
> search in
> menu?  Maybe it should be a buffer.  New Gtk hides menu under an
> unintuitive button anyway so this could just display searchable 
> Menu
> buffer.

I think it would be possible to implement such menus without GTK 
using just child frames.

> > The main frame area is treated as just one big canvas that 
> > redisplay
> > works its magic on as it would if it were just a TUI.
>
> Maybe that is a good thing.
>
> Widget toolkit dependency is a heavy price to pay for.

I don't think it's a "heavy price to pay" in general. It greatly 
simplifies many applications, which if they were to forego a 
toolkit, would likely have codebases comparable to GTK or 
Emacs. But its true that Emacs is far more decoupled, for better 
or worse, from toolkits than your average GUI app.