On 04/10/2013 01:58 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
steven Mitchell writes:
> One thing I would like to see is support for SVG graphics in icons and
> widgets.
If you mean using Imagemagick or something to transform them to
pixmaps that XEmacs can use, sure, why not?
Currently, icons can be .xpm or .png
files and I think are converted to
widgets
when loaded, or something like that. I was saying that I would like to
see .svg
icons be able to be used in the same way. SVG files are text, so it is
easy to write
scripts to generate new icon sets, mass-change the coloring of the
background
of a whole set of icons in a script, substitute new parts of images for
the whole set, etc.
Byrel and I made a set of icons, using the original icons and centering
them over
a splash of color, green currently, that makes them sort of attractive
on a black
background. Byrel worked out the method and later Benson wrote an awk
script
to use NETPBM tools so It would generate a set of 14 icons for the
register-toolbar.el
that I wrote. Implemented as a minor mode, it gives you 10 registers
for multi-copy/paste
as well as giving a preview of what you are going to insert, etc.
There are over 40 icons that are distributed with XEmacs, and if you
make a full set
(up, down, up with caption, down with caption, and greyed out of each icon),
that is 5 x 40 or over 200 icon files for a full set! Maybe that is
why there are not a lot
of sets out there yet. If you use the icon-themes we wrote a couple of
years ago,
you might find yourself needing to make complete sets of icons--in 4
sizes, so that is
somewhere over 800 icons to make for a set. Scripting really helps in
that case.
But I don't know how to tell how big a job implementing SVG that would
be, since I
do not understand all that might be involved. Or what skills are needed
for a guy
to be able to do that in a summer.
You know, there is one other thing that I'd like to do, that is to
implement mouse click
detections on the toolbar and tabbar. It seems natural to see an
opposite-click menu
on tabs to do a variety of things like save the file in that buffer,
close the tab, save-as,
reload that tab, or whatever you want.
Problem is that there is no response to opposite or middle clicks on the
tabbar.
And seemingly no way to get them as long as we are using the Lucid
toolkit to do the tabbar.
There are other things that cannot be implemented easily with the Lucid
tabbar,
such as putting 2 buttons (widgets) in the tab bar:
I want to add left and right arrows on the end of the tab bar, so when
you have more
files than fit at once, you can click on those arrows to "page" through
the list of open files,
sorted by whatever rules you want (alphabetical, last opened, or whatever).
Analogous to the arrows on a scroll bar, sort of.
That would be part of an additional way to work with tabs, when more are
opened
than fit on the screen at one time. grouping them as it does now, by
file extension
is ok, but doesn't suit the way I work writing cnc files. I switch from
.txt to .html to .vf2, to .vf5
and reference files of whatever extension in writing a single program,
and currently,
the tabs get grouped into all .txt together, all .vf2 together, etc.
arrows on the end would
let me quickly switch to different "pages" of the open tabs.
Another thing that cannot be done with the tabbar as it is implemented
now is background
pixmaps. The tabbar face lets you set one and specify a pixmap.
Because they are not implemented in whatever Lucid gutter thing that is
used for the
tabbar now, setting it has no effect. I might be the only person that
cares much about the
look of XEmacs, but I imagine how nice it would look if there were
themes, and what steps
are needed to make everything themable, Imagine a wood theme, with a
light wood grain
as the background pixmap in the text area and other background pixmaps
of darker wood
for the scrollbars, menubars, toolbar, and tabbar,
Another thing the Lucid tabbar doesn't allow is changing the color of
individual tabs--all
have to be the same face. Why make them changeable?
One reason, so you can have the current selected tab visually different
from other tabs.
Another reason, to change the tab color of, say, read-only files so they
are visually identifiable
as you peruse the tab bar. You could then identify files on the tab bar
by other criteria too.
Like everything else, it is more complicated than it looks at first and
takes lots more time.
And as you pointed out, where would we get the manpower?
But if I mention the ideas on the list here, chances are somebody can
point out which ideas have
some potential VS those that are really, really hard to implement, or
just bad ideas.
I appreciate any comments.
On the other hand, if you mean XEmacs displaying SVG on the fly,
that
looks like a big undertaking that would completely change the nature
of XEmacs (if done properly), though. There used to be a libsvg
distributed with Cairo, but that was abandoned a decade ago.
Nowadays, the most barebones implementation available is librsvg,
which pulls in most of GNOME it seems like (well, not "most", but it's
pretty bad). Other implementations are like Webkit, etc.
I thought it was libsvg
that was mentioned on the mailing list a year or
more ago,
I had no idea that it had been abandoned, or that there were several
implementations.
I'm personally open to thinking about it, but where are we going
to
get the manpower? Unfortunately, I'm not likely to be much help
myself.
Thanks,
Steve M.
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