That "vision" thang...

[Marcus Harnisch]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> writes:

> Marcus Harnisch writes:
>
>  > Excuse my ignorance, but are you sure this is still true with recent
>  > toolkit? All this looks quite flexible to me:
>  > 
>  > http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtk/stable/TextWidget.html
>
> Flexible, maybe.  The design looks to be an abstraction of Emacs
> buffers and windows.

That was my first impression when I saw that.

> But I have no idea how it performs on a 1GB buffer, and I have no
> idea how it performs in a buffer with 30000 GtkTextTags.  I wonder
> if it can keep up with a buffer that's being fed by a process, and
> so on.

This is an excellent example of where we could benefit from using a
toolkit. One of our users complains, we identify GtkTextView and can
tap a much larger pool people to look at the issue than just XEmacs
developers.

> There are several misfeatures I've identified already. [...]
>
> Many many questions remain.  [...]

Doe anyone know a GTK expert? Perhaps one of the gedit developers? I
suspect that gedit was the driving force behind all these features. It
has grown into more than a Notepad-for-Gnome.

> My guess is that it would actually be quite a bit *harder* to
> implement Emacs buffers and windows using GtkTextBuffer and
> GtkTextView than it is to implement Emacs windows using Xlib.

I was pointing to that merely because I found the similarity in
concept a good way to demonstrate that toolkits have moved on quite a
bit since our first attempt to integrate GTK. Multiline text editing
has become more than what we find in HTML.

Not knowing much about either XEmacs internals nor GTK, I would
probably start with desktop integration features before tackling
buffer rendering. In fact I guess this would be the last thing to
convert simply because it does work smoothly on the platforms I use.

Regards
Marcus