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Re: New Emacs with GTK!


From: Hubert Chan
Subject: Re: New Emacs with GTK!
Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2003 13:09:35 -0500
User-agent: Gnus/5.090015 (Oort Gnus v0.15) Emacs/21.3.50

>>>>> "Niels" == Niels Freimann <nfreimann@firemail.de> writes:

[...]

Niels> However one thing must be clear: Any future development must
Niels> place gtk into the very center.

Absolutely not.  If anything, future development should focus on making
it really easy to switch toolkits.  (Disclaimer: I am not an emacs
developer.  I am also not trying to influence emacs developers; I
believe that they know what they are doing.)  What happens if you lock
yourself into GTK, and GTK becomes obsolete?  Or GTK3 comes out and is
API incompatible with GTK2 (much like what happened between GTK1 and
GTK2).

The best way to make sure that you'll be able to switch to the future
toolkit is to maintain support for multiple currently existing toolkits.
If you ditch support for Xt, motif, ncurses, etc. it becomes very easy
to dig yourself into a GTK2 hole that will be very hard to get out of if
you ever need to switch to anything else.  By keeping the other
toolkits, you know where all the pitfalls will be when you ever want to
use something else.

I agree that GTK support is important, but good GTK support is not
mutually exclusive with supporting other toolkits, even ncurses.

One of the reasons that I chose gnus as my mail reader is because I
could always ssh into my computer to check my mail.  My main emacs use
is in graphical mode, but I'm really thankful that I have the option to
use text mode if I ever need to.  And don't forget all those blind
users who use emacsspeak, and have no real need for GTK support.

[...]

Niels> Emacs must look and feel like any other gnome, kde, or window,
Niels> application.

Yes.  And how is it going to look and feel like a KDE or Windows (or
Mac OSX, or even CDE) program if it just uses GTK?

In fact, Emacs seems to be doing pretty well in this area already.  In
Windows, if I click on File | Open, I get a Windows file selection
dialog.  (At least I did the last time I used NTEmacs, about three
years ago.)  In Linux, under GNOME, if I click on File | Open, I get
the GTK file selection dialog.  It looks to me like supporting ncurses
isn't having any negative effect on GTK support.

[...]

Niels> To be polemical: our competition isn't vms or something, but M$
Niels> windows.

Our competition is not Windows.  In fact, emacs runs just fine under
Windows.

-- 
Hubert Chan <hubert@uhoreg.ca> - http://www.uhoreg.ca/
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