Re: Multimedia dashboard in GNU Emacs

[joakim@verona.se]

Aiko Kyle <aikokyle@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi Joakim!
>
> Po and I were previously discussing this in the context of the webkit
> xwidget on this thread:
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2021-12/msg01914.html
>
> On Wed, Dec 29, 2021 at 6:34 AM <joakim@verona.se> wrote:
>>
>> It kind of has to, in order to preserve the way emacs behaves.
>> That is multiple views of the same buffer, and so on.
>>
>> In the original xwidget branch there were some alternative behaviours
>> implemented as proof of concepts, and they worked to some degree, but
>> breaks the emacs paradigm, so they arent really all that useful IMHO.
>>
>
> I think that the question of how well an xwidget obeys "the emacs
> paradigm" depends on the content it's displaying. If it were a button
> or some other element in a larger button, I agree that the current
> model fits the emacs way well enough. However I think when the xwidget
> is the only element in a buffer and takes up a large portion or even
> the whole window, then I think the correct paradigm would resemble
> something like doc-view, where the two widow's xwidgets can show
> different views if they have some notion of scrolling.

This was one of the methods that was evaluated in the original branch,
that is, every emacs window got its own separate gtk component.

So, if the xwidget was a gtk button, for example, inserted in a buffer,
and there were several emacs window showing the same area, each emacs
window would get a separate gtk button representing the same xwidget.
This worked okay-ish, for buttons. But for sliders it didnt turn out so
well, because one needed special glue code to make each separate gtk
slider be in sync with every other instance. It's doable, but
convoluted. Anyway, I'm sure theres been plenty of progress since the
original experiments, so maybe today it's less convoluted.

>
>> There might also be some kind of experiment involving redirection of an
>> applications main window to an offscreen widget, that might be useful
>> for xwidget, but I'm not entirely sure.
>>
>
> This is the current implementation that Po Lu has fixed various
> flickering bugs on master for xwidgets on x. However both the xwidgets
> on ns and my emacs module emacs-webkit, handles this in a different
> way where the webkitview can only be displayed in one window.
-- 
Joakim Verona
joakim@verona.se