Re: What improvements would be truly useful?

[Daniele Nicolodi <daniele@grinta.net>]

On 05/03/2018 12:22, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> From: Daniele Nicolodi <daniele@grinta.net>
>> Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2018 11:51:09 -0700
>>
>> I think that what will help to keep Emacs relevant in the long run is
>> modernizing its structure and code base, moving away from the baroque
>> architecture that developed as a result of its very long history (and
>> some less than optimally future proof design decisions).
> 
> What exactly are you talking about here?  AFAIK, the Emacs
> architecture didn't change since its inception, so its long history
> has no relevance here.  But maybe I'm missing something or
> misunderstanding what you intended to convey.

I'm far from being familiar with the Emacs codebase thus I may be
reporting something that it is not completely true, however: Emacs was
born as a console only application, the graphical user interface seems
to be duct taped on.  Also, GTK support seems a bit of an hack that
requires layering violations (reaching down to the X primitives) to
work.  Being GTK the only modern toolkit supported on Linux (as far as I
know) and the only way to get nartive Wayland support, some radical
cleanup in that area would probably be a good thing.
>> What would improve my user experience would be improvements to the
>> display engine that will allow a better document viewing
>> capabilities in something like pdf-tools (like continuous
>> scrolling).
> 
> AFAIU, that's already possible from the display engine POV, what's
> missing is application-level Lisp code that would take advantage of
> the infrastructure.

Reading the pdf-tools bug report on the matter, I had the impression
that implementing this was not possible because of some Emacs
limitations.  I'm happy if that's not the case.  I'll go and investigate
more.

Cheers,
Dan