Re: That "vision" thang...

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen(a)xemacs.org&gt; writes: What is the current state? Embarassingly, to a new user, Win32 support appears to integrated best of all platforms. I am not talking about technical details or internal functionality here! I am talking about "look and feel". With changes in Unix desktop world over the past couple of years, I fear that Unix support is falling behind. And, BTW, what is "native look-and-feel" these days anyway? Thanks to various skinnable and themeable applications (audio players, and certain webbrowsers), this is a thing of the past. I had to switch to Office2007 recently, which was definitely a long overdue upgrade (from '97). But it took me *several minutes* until I figured how to print my freakin' document. The new UI isn't bad it is just such a radical change that makes you hate it. And again it looks completely different from any other application. There is always a split to be made between having a particular application behave the same way on every platform, so that experienced users will feel home immediatly even when switching from, say, Unix to Windows or vice versa -- or whether that application should be as tightly integrated into each platform's user interface to make it look familiar to new users (experienced on the platform perhaps but not with the application itself), even at the expense of confusing experts. I am fully aware of this. Started looking into "Internals" and closed the book rather quickly again. And that covers only the documented part:^) Xft: Of course it is not cross platform. That's my point! We shouldn't have to worry about stuff like that. We should rely on toolkit functions for display the same way as we rely on the OS for file I/O. And if they switch to Xft2 or something (assuming little changes to the API), that should concern us about as much as it concerns us whether #'find-file reads from Ext4, ZFS, or NTFS. Windows does have one. In fact I never noticed until just now, because it only comes up when you use the menu item File->Print. And it does work nicely, indeed. On the other hand, the XEmacs idea that dialogs will only be used for functions called via menu should be relaxed. Some functions on platforms don't work reasonably well without a dialog. M-x print-buffer/-region/etc. in Win32 should maybe have similar behavior as the toolbar printer icon in other Win32 programs (use current settings of print dialog). GTK doesn't work for me since I prefer Xft in its current state over an abandoned GUI toolkit. If it GTK uses native print, I wouldn't be surprised if the behavior were similar to Win32. And with that, of course, I mean a native font selection dialog... It might be that the world around us has moved on to XKB. Maybe I'll find the time for a bug report over the weekend. We should face the inevitable truth and not fool ourselves: Any toolkit decision will cause grief for a subset of XEmacs users -- just as the current situation does for some. Thanks (also to the entire active developer crew) Marcus _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta