Re: A gtk/kde-xemacs... a modest toolbar/menubar proposal...
At 11:57 AM 3/19/00 -0500, William M. Perry wrote:
Well, my proposal was accepted by the BeOpen folks on SourceXchange,
so I'm
going to start working on the various documents outlining how I'll be
replacing the lwlib/motif/athena/etc widgets with gtk or qt. 99.9% sure it
is going to have to be gtk after talking with stallman and the discussion
we had on the mailing list a few weeks ago. Ah well...
Cool!
But while I was sketching out some things, and looking at the current
EmacsFrame widget I wondered why we should even bother having the toolbars
and menubars managed differently than the various 'gutters' that andy has
implemented. If I'm going to be completely rewriting large chunks of that
code, why not take the next step and just use the gutter than andy has
worked so hard on? Things like scrollbars would still need to be done in
the core I think (because they go with windows not frames).
I think this would work well for toolbars but not so well for menubars (I'm
thinking of the mswindows implementation here). You would also need to
implement 3d buttons under athena if you were to replace the toolbar
implementation. You would also gain the ability to have several rows of
toolbars which is standard for many mswindows apps. However I would
advocate running the two side-by-side at least for a couple of releases.
Also I would take the mswindows gui code as a template for this and try and
get away from using lwlib at all. I guess this depends on how like
Intrinsics the API is. I would not advocate rewriting lwlib, it is far too
fragile in my experience.
But yes in principle this would work and would be much more flexible than
what we have at the moment.
I would be interested in critiquing any design docs you produce ...
andy
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Dr Andy Piper
Senior Consultant Architect, BEA Systems Ltd