Re: Emacs Survey: Toolbars

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>
> Cc: eliz@gnu.org,  ghe@sdf.org,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2020 12:21:12 +0100
> 
> One annoyance is also renderer which in Emacs can't draw an "empty
> buffer". Libre Office draws a white rectangle and some lines
> around. Emacs can't do that since we can't draw things in layers, at
> least what I am aware of (Mr. Eli? ).

I don't think I understand what you are saying, because you didn't
elaborate about the "white rectangle and some lines around" drawn by
LibreOffice.  Emacs _is_ capable of displaying an empty buffer, you
can easily see that for you self if you do "C-x b foobar RET".  And we
also have some decorations around the window and the frame, regardless
of whether or not there's text displayed there.

So I think the important question here is: what would we like/need to
display "around" an empty text area?  Armed with that knowledge, we
could discuss how to do that in Emacs (if we decide it's important
enough).

I also think that it is not wise to talk about page decorations before
we actually have a WYSIWYG editor that can display formatted text.
The decorations are secondary features, IMO, the perceived difficulty
in providing them shouldn't stop us from implementing "the meat" of
any word processor.