Re: Platform independent graphical display for Emacs

[Óscar Fuentes]

Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com> writes:

> Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es> writes:
>
>> Yes, because having a single, modern, sane, popular cross-platform
>> graphics library (let's say Skia, for instance) would make things much
>> worse than the current status-quo, with N entangled backends requiring
>> the participation of multiple experts every time a new feature is
>> implemented :-/
>
> No "cross-platform graphics library" is either truly cross-platform or
> acceptable for our purposes.

Because you know them all and you, and only you, define what is
acceptable for our purposes.

> Skia itself is simply a no-goer.  That abomination is impossible to
> build outside the context of Chromium

Just to check your assertion, I tried to build Skia on my Debian box
and, sure enough, after ten minutes of work the build succesfully
completed. I had some issues that were swiftly solved with a web search.
No Chromium involved, not even for doing the web search ;-)

A closer look at Skia makes me think that it is not a good candidate for
Emacs, for several reasons. But Skia was just an example, we (or, better
said, the OP) can examine what other options are available.

>> 3. New graphical capabilities that will make possible new high-level
>>    features.
>
>> I don't know why you keep ignoring point 3, which is the most important,
>> and reduce the proposal to "oh, someone wants to add one more graphical
>> backend."
>
> Please explain in detail what the new graphical capabilities are, and
> how using a different graphics library will help.

We could turn the frame into a canvas. Take
display-fill-column-indicator for instance. Instead of faking a line
with characters, we could simply draw the line as a graphic object.