Andy Piper <andy(a)xemacs.org&gt; writes: You could possibly use a face, but I personally hate the idea of creating an entire face just because you want to change the background color on _one_ item. Emacs allows you to stick a special property on a region just to specify the background/foreground color. My emacs 21.x beta is screwed up right now and can't even check docstrings, so I can't verify what the syntax is. Having to worry about unique names for faces, whether they are temporary or permanent, etc, etc, etc. gets kind of annoying. Emacs/W3 goes to some pain to use temporary faces so that people don't wonder what the w3-nil-nil-red-green face is all about. It just does it in a slightly different way. The 'signals' are really just callbacks for well defined events. Creating a wrapper around MS-Windows would not be that difficult. It has been far too long since I've done any Motif programming (thank the gods) for me to speak about doing it there though. I'm not being sponsored generically to 'work on XEmacs'... I am essentially contracting for BeOpen.com (thru SourceXchange) for this specific project. The main goals are unix portability at first. This will be distributed as a set of patches against the 'stable' XEmacs and (I guess) integrated into the core infodock sources that they do builds off of. When I get some more breathing room, I plan on maintaining the port and getting as much of it into the 21.2 (or later) tree. Because so much is changing in the 21.2 stuff, I am going to initially be working off of 21.1.9. When I get back to the 'free time' hacking I want to move it up to 21.2 and maybe even do the 'real' port to use Gtk canvas and friends to do the redisplay. That would get you anti-aliased text, MS-Windows, MacOS, and BeOS ports trivially. Part of this 'upgrade' would be doing the widgets in buffers stuff. The first thing on the agenda is getting XEmacs to use the gtk/gnome widgets for its decorations, then comes the language bindings. I definitely agree with the look-and-feel. This is one of the reasons I _hate_ 'themes' in modern toolkits like Qt and Gtk. The whole point of having a 'standard' toolkit is that things LOOK THE SAME. Even if two people are running the exact same version of GNOME and Gtk, the widget layouts and looks can vary far too much. This is why I am reworking my plans after you and ben argued for !gtk widget sets being used. I have no idea how difficult it would be to use motif, but win32 shouldn't be _terribly_ difficult. Not real high on my priority list, but I think the stuff I've outlined is generic enough to let it be done. All feedback is good feedback. I really appreciate all the time you took making the X stuff work. I unfortunately don't have the time or expertise to implement this under Windows at the same time. That's why I think exploring the native Gtk port would be interesting. But then you lose the 'looks like windows to me' aspect. Qt gets around this better than Gtk, since their windows theme is much more complete. But it is still only 99% there. I don't really notice because I never use windows any more, but daily windows users notice the little annoyances much more. And the Gtk GUI stuff will be completely separate from the Gtk language bindings. If one gets into the core XEmacs before the other, so be it. The one thing I _really_ hate is that Gtk and Qt are not multi-display. If we could use motif or something else eventually, I'd be ecstatic. I use the multi-display stuff fairly often and will really miss it when I start using the gtk version. :( -Bill P.