Re: Platform independent graphical display for Emacs

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com> writes:

> 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.

Yeah, it's annoying.

> 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).

It's popular to switch them off, though.  😀

> That said, all of this would obviously be a lot of work and until and
> unless someone starts such work this is all rather academic.

There's definitely different cultures surrounding the toolkit issue.
Some people want all their applications on the OS they use to look the
same, and some people want the application they use to look the same on
all OS-es.  I think the astounding success of VSCode points to the first
group of people putting up with it if they have to, but there's a lot of
grumbling.

Anyway, this inspired me to have a look at the no-toolkit build of Emacs
for the first time in years, and...  it's a bit rough.  There's no HiDPI
support, apparently, so all the icons/menus look unusably tiny on this
screen.  And the scroll bar apparently works the same as an xterm in
1989?  That is, left/right mouse clicks goes down/up, and you can't drag
it at all.

So it's no wonder that few people are using that.  But if want to cater
more to people that want Emacs to look the same on all operating
systems, there's at least a base to start working from, because it seems
to work fine otherwise.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no