Re: Aquamacs distro for OS X like behavior

[David Reitter]

On 8 Apr 2005, at 10:17, Johan Vromans wrote:

> Also, I think the number of widgets that emacs will use is rather
> limited.

Using a UI toolkit represents a long-term commitment. Given that UI 
toolkits seem to live in a fashion-driven biosphere, it might be 
interesting to consider alternatives.

How about documenting interfaces for the most commonly used functions, 
starting with tasks where a good GUI would be helpful? For example, one 
could define a structured language to serialize customization settings, 
which could then be parsed by little external modules - written by the 
community or the port people in order to implement system-native 
behavior. This would not preclude the use of the default behavior, i.e. 
customization buffers. I understand (and I know very little about the 
technical side of emacs!) that custom options have such an API anyways 
- it would come down to defining a serialization (to write stuff into a 
file and read it out again) and an update protocol.