>>>> "Aidan" == Aidan Kehoe
<kehoea(a)parhasard.net> writes:
> But normally, programming directly again X(t) isn't worth
the
> bother ... there are many nice toolkits out there (Qt, GTK+,
> vxwindows and others).
Aidan> But, unfortunately, their implementations are not that
Aidan> finished on XEmacs, so there’s a need to learn the X
Aidan> library to finish them.
I don't think so, actually. You might have to do some extra work
because you couldn't steal low-level X functions, but the highlevel
XEmacs redisplay now has drivers for tty, Xt, Motif, GTK+ v1, Qt, two
different ones for Carbon/QuickDraw, MS Windows, and BeOS (at least).
(I oughtta ask akochoi if he'd like to try Postscript! About the only
thing it would be _hard_ to support is raw X.) If you're going to
substitute TK-du-jour for lower-level ones or, even more efficiently,
declare "this is the TK API we support, get it on your platform," it
should be rather straightfoward to just implement in TK-du-jour. The
hard work comes if (for example) you want to support both GTK+ on the
local workstation and Xt/Motif on a remote link, or if TK-du-jour
doesn't support multiple remote connections but you want to do that.
Because I care about users who don't use TK-du-jour, either because it
isn't available on platform of choice or because doesn't have native
look 'n' feel there, I oppose taking that route for XEmacs. (It's
been proposed; Didier Verna is probably most closely associated with
the idea at XEmacs.) But I'd be interested to see how it works for
SXEmacs. (Fear of Forking is way overblown. This is what is so cool
about OSS!)
I also like working with Xt, believe it or not. It's sort of like a
religious pilgrimage at the same time as hacking. (Sorry, Norbert,
I'm not smoking anything so I can't send it to you. :-)
> But unless you are used to hacking XEmacs, XEmacs itself might
> be a bigger stumbling block. Even getting that beast to build
> is a challenge :)
I'd like to hear more about this. It certainly has not been true in
my experience, except at CVS HEAD and on proprietary platforms
(specifically, I personally delivered DOAs on MSVC at least twice in
the early 21.4 series because I couldn't build on that platform).
--
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