Re: New Emacs with GTK!

[Miles Bader]

Michael Powe <michael@trollope.org> writes:
> >>>>> "Niels" == Niels Freimann <nfreimann@firemail.de> writes:
>     Niels> Dear Lucien, I do not subscribe to any claim about a
>     Niels> renaissance of the text console. Nevertheless if you and
>     Niels> others persist on an ncurses emacs then why not splitting
>     Niels> emacs into gtk and ncurses applications, sharing display
>     Niels> unrelated code via libraries, and removing all the motif, ..,
>     Niels> code forever ?
> 
> and again, what is the point of forking the code, and reducing the
> number of systems on which it can be used?  so you can have a pretty
> desktop?  from a maintenance standpoint, having two versions of the
> same software, and having to update two versions simultaneously, makes
> absolutely no sense whatever.  it would be a nightmare.

Anyway, it's simply not going to happen.  RMS is pretty conservative and
careful as emacs maintainer, and won't remove support for something unless
it's completely obvious that no one needs it (it was suggested recently to
remove the non-toolkit X support, but I think that plan was scratched
because some people said they still used it).

Whatever some people think about the tty interface, it's still widely used,
though often as a secondary interface (e.g. when telneting in from a remote
system).  Morever, I there's a strong cultural attachment to tty support
among the sort of people who hack on / use emacs, at least among my
generation.

It is true that supporting all the display mechanisms it does adds a bunch
of hair to the redisplay code; however I think it would be better to adopt
a better internal architecture to support them all in a more regular
fashion (as I believe xemacs has done), rather than only supporting one.

-Miles
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