Re: Platform independent graphical display for Emacs

[Po Lu]

Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> writes:

> AFAIK, no ports other than PGTK have any Wayland support either.

> So with the transition of GNU/Linux world from X to Wayland, we'd
> either have drop all other ports (aside from w32 and ns, I suppose),
> or end up dealing with this somehow anyway.

We are not going to drop the X port.  Wayland is important, but it's
only available on a small amount of systems, certainly not all the
Unix-like systems currently support.

Other free systems such as FreeBSD immediately come to mind.

> I suppose the hope at this point is that Wayland and set of its
> extensions will stabilize soon-ish, because it would also help with
> adoption by other programs.

I too hope that, but a decade of Wayland development hasn't brought us
much in that direction.

> Lucid doesn't look nice, nor does it support modern features like
> scaling. But for all I know, the potential developer could start with
> improving Lucid instead, and at some point reach the state where they
> are satisfied with how things work.

I would welcome improvements to the Lucid toolkit.  Scaling is mostly
not the tookit's job under X, we just use GDK functions to get the
display's scale and apply that when creating the Cairo surface, AFAIU.

> After that, it might be a question whether people want to try unifying
> the w32 and ns ports too (by switching to rendering widgets with
> e.g. OpenGL). Or not.

OpenGL is not practical for many things such as text rendering.  It is
also slow over X forwarding.

> This discussion started with a person expressing interest.

No, it started with a person saying that we should decide to adopt his
approach.  He did not volunteer to write it and do the work required to
integrate it with Emacs, I think.