Re: Platform independent graphical display for Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Cc: luangruo@yahoo.com, drew.adams@oracle.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>
> Date: Sat, 25 Dec 2021 02:30:25 +0200
> 
> On 24.12.2021 10:33, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> >> 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.
> > Not only that, I'd hesitate to accept such a contribution, because its
> > long-term maintenance would most probably be a constant burden,
> 
> How it that different from a BeOS port, or a PGTK port, or etc? Where 
> the general policy has been (I think?) that we accept such contributions 
> as long as there interest from the author in maintaining it, and some 
> probable interest the users.

The suggestion, as I understood it, was to drop all the other toolkits
and leave only this proposed one.  That was its main "selling point".
If we decide to have just one toolkit, then having that unmaintained
would be a serious problem for the future of Emacs.

> I would hate to discourage someone from taking the initiative a trying 
> to create a better "no-toolkit" port which supports font scaling, for 
> example.

The suggestion was not to improve the no-toolkit configuration and
leave all the supported toolkits in place.  The suggestion was to drop
all the others.

I have nothing in principle against improving the no-toolkit
configuration.  I do think that _adding_ another no-toolkit
configuration would be undesirable, because it would make the
proverbial "spaghetti of Emacs code" even harder to understand and
maintain.  (I don't think such a suggestion is on the table, but since
you seem to say I misunderstood the suggestion, perhaps I've
misunderstood that as well.)

> Worst-case scenario, we'd just have to drop that "port", wouldn't we?

We cannot just "drop" the only toolkit we have.

> Like some people said previously, Emacs feels similar in spirit to 
> another popular FLOSS project: Blender. Community of professionals, 
> keyboard-driven interface, power and customizability.
> 
> Blender never used an existing GUI toolkit. And I think it looks pretty 
> good (even though I hope it has grown a light-bg theme by now):
> 
> https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/_images/editors_preferences_section_interface.png
> https://b3d.interplanety.org/wp-content/upload_content/2016/09/01-4.jpg
> 
> Of course, the Blender community is much larger and better funded, but 
> OTOH the number of different UI elements we'd need to support is much 
> smaller as well.

I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying we don't have such
talent on board.  Maybe Blender does, which would be understandable,
given the focus of the project.  Our experience is that GUI experts in
our ranks are very rare and far in-between, and there are no reasons
to believe this will change.

> And we could tap into some existing community talent by having a lot of 
> the UI logic implemented in Lisp. Similarly to how a number of recent 
> web browser projects have their UIs implemented with JS+HTML.

I think this hope is misguided, because Emacs Lisp was not designed to
be a UI programming language, it was designed as a text-processing
language.  So it would need significant extensions to get closer to
your dream.