Re: Platform independent graphical display for Emacs

[Po Lu]

Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com> writes:

> I don't think that what we do necessarily translates very well to the
> widgets provided by common toolkits.  For example, the mode line is
> not rendered by a toolkit.

That's because it's part of an Emacs window, not a widget.

> Dialogs are basically not very useful or Emacsy as is.  When they pop
> up, you are completely outside of "Emacs land", and there is no way for
> us to add keybindings, style them, etc. or do much of anything really.

Just as in gedit and other graphical editors, no?

> Our scrollbars are fairly subpar compared to the ones in VSCode, at
> least in GTK.  Admittedly that might be to some extent because it is
> hard to style them from Lisp themes (I guess that's not currently
> possible).

The built-in (as in, no toolkit) scrollbar is even worse, though can be
styled via some X resources.

> There is a similar story with the tab bar, tab line and toolbar.

The tool bar is displayed by Emacs itself on all platforms except GTK
and NS, and the tab line and tab bar are always displayed by Emacs
itself.

> Then we have things like the posframe package, where the minibuffer pops
> up on top of the current buffers.  That currently works with a hack (a
> separate frame) but we could imagine having our own widget for that.
> IMO, we would ideally want that to look the same across platforms.

Child frames basically look the same regardless of platform, as long as
window decorations are turned off (if they are on, again, that's outside
our control).  They are even implemented the same way widgets are on X,
via an X window with a parent, so I don't really see the difference.

> No idea.  I guess the menus would be different on macOS.

NS users will complain.  Besides, I find the global menu bar concept
rather nice from my limited usage of GNUstep, and I hope more programs
will grow to support such behaviour.

It is certainly better than the fat-finger-button-hamburger-menu GNOME
people want these days.