From: David De La Harpe Golden <david@harpegolden.net>
To: german@xelalug.org
Cc: Emacs <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
Subject: Re: Emacs with Cocoa/GNUstep
Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2011 20:13:51 +0100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <4DB86AEF.7060809@harpegolden.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1303864750.11832.3.camel@german-desktop>
On 27/04/11 01:39, Germán Arias wrote:
> Hi, I'm trying to run emacs with GNUstep, but it seems to be totally
> broken. So my question is if someone is running emacs with Cocoa and if
> it works fine. Because with latest gnustep packages don't work (compile
> but can't run). And after the last update in file configure.in, the
> class nsmenu.m can't compile. So I can guess there isn't testing in
> GNUstep/Cocoa.
Probably not a whole lot.... FWIW, I built it successfully several times
a few months back, and though it was not really especially useful once
built, it was not completely unusable either, it was working enough for
me to debug some pasteboard interaction issues without having access to
macosx.
I'm not personally up to doing much it about it at the moment, so here
are some notes (Stefan: mostly same ones I passed offlist to you at the
time) as a braindump, some of the below is probably obsolete:
First and foremost, DO NOT use any debian packages of GNUstep at time of
writing, they're obsolete and hopelessly buggy, especially on 64-bit. I
wasted basically a weekend's worth of emacs-time that way, I switched to
an svn checkout of GNUstep installed to /usr/local/GNUstep and was up
and running fairly rapidly.
GNUstep itself is fairly painless to build from source (though n.b. I am
used to underdocumented build scripts from hell from work, my perception
may be skewed), the most tricky bit was getting building the
gnustep-back backend right, so that I could use cairo.
http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/GNUstep_Installation_Process
The other build-time issue is that emacs "./configure --with-ns" doesn't
seem to discover the ObjC headers properly in the gnustep case -
specifying CPPFLAGS "fixed" that, but I suspect TRT would be to have
emacs' configure use "gnustep-config --objc-flags" to discover the flags
(or maybe just $GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES and the right part of gnustep's
Makefiles, but gnustep-config seems interesting 'cos it apparently works
much like other blah-config type tools).
I wouldn't say it is _totally_ unusable, but neither is it at all
pleasant . There are probably plenty more smaller issues that I'm
presently not noticing given the big ones:
0. Make sure the relevant gnustep daemons are running.
I mean the gpbs / gdnc /gdomap daemons. Not really an emacs problem,
and documented in the gnustep docs, just something to be aware of.
gpbs is particularly important, as it's the GNUstep PasteBoard Server,
and without it, clipboard/primary/secondary just ain't gonna work.
http://gnustep.made-it.com/BuildGuide/index.html#GNUSTEP.SERVICES
1. frame resizing.
The single most major annoyance (or at least tied with repaint) is that
it doesn't handle being resized by the window manager, you have to
(set-frame-width/height) from within emacs for it to work. I guess
macosx handles resizing differently.
2. repaint
There are nasty repaint issues sometimes too upon partial scrolling, a
bit like the ones you used to see on w32 emacs under wine. A
page-scroll up and down has thus far largely dispelled them when they
occur. Some of the colors seem way off (my yellow-on-black fringes come
out cyan-on-white).
3. toolbar/scrollbar.
The toolbar doesn't work, and the scrollbars only work sometimes, but
it's not like I use either much. The menu bar is fine.
4. choice of fonts and gui backend:
Wrong choice of font can render it difficult to use too - its metric
computation isn't always right I guess, with one font I ended up with
something like a 3-pixel high minibuffer.
Remember that GNUstep also has multiple graphics backends with different
font behaviours, I used the cairo backend which reputedly has slightly
poorer font rendering than art, but OTOH worked.
Remember to try with "openapp Emacs -Q", because your ~/.emacs (which
gnustep will see) might be setting a problematic font, mine initially was.
It sometimes makes "interesting" font choices itself, I don't know where
it found some sort of comic-sans alike on my system but it did.
5. Non-latin chars.
Doesn't seem to do well here at all.
6. keyboard modifier mapping
One thing that helped a lot was to reconfigure the gnustep-level
keyboard modifier mapping so that the keys in ns emacs ultimately wound
up similar to x11 emacs with its out-of-box defaults.
http://www.gnustep.org/resources/documentation/Developer/Back/General/DefaultsSummary.html
I used (with Help on Super_R because I wanted to see what it did, turns
out ns emacs treats it as Hyper...):
NSGlobalDomain GSFirstControlKey Control_L
NSGlobalDomain GSSecondControlKey Control_R
NSGlobalDomain GSFirstAlternateKey Alt_L
NSGlobalDomain GSSecondAlternateKey NoSymbol
NSGlobalDomain GSFirstCommandKey Super_L
NSGlobalDomain GSSecondCommandKey NoSymbol
NSGlobalDomain GSFirstHelpKey Help
NSGlobalDomain GSSecondHelpKey Super_R
7. [new since I passed this to Stefan]. No timers/idle???
Timers and idle stuff mostly not running, I think. Emacs processes stuff
when there's input i.e. wiggle the mouse to make stuff happen ?!
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2011-04-27 19:13 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 11+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2011-04-27 0:39 Emacs with Cocoa/GNUstep Germán Arias
2011-04-27 1:19 ` David Reitter
2011-04-27 3:56 ` CHENG Gao
2011-04-27 4:38 ` Germán Arias
2011-04-27 4:56 ` CHENG Gao
2011-04-27 6:13 ` Paul Eggert
2011-04-27 23:54 ` Germán Arias
2011-04-27 4:15 ` Pascal J. Bourguignon
2011-04-27 19:13 ` David De La Harpe Golden [this message]
2011-04-28 0:24 ` Germán Arias
2011-04-28 15:30 ` Stefan Monnier
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