Re: redisplay system of emacs

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Paul R writes:

 > Is there an official "emacs 2" page (or project) where emacs people can
 > elaborate on how they would design emacs, if they had to start it from
 > scratch today ?

Dunno.  Some references for you, though:

The Emacswiki (http://www.emacswiki.org/), especially the
ExtensionLanguage, WishList, EmacsImplementations, and History pages
may be of interest, and a good place for such a resource.  Ben Wing's
Architecting XEmacs is "official" (as much as anything can be in a
free software project) but for the wrong Emacs
(http://www.xemacs.org/Architecting-XEmacs/).  The XEmacs Internals
manual is probably the most detailed description of current Emacs
implementation, although again it's the wrong Emacs (and partial).
(http://www.xemacs.org/Documentation/21.5/html/internals.html).

 > For exemple, I am amazed by the success of the Xmonad window
 > manager in this field : dynamic community, good documentation,
 > robust and correct behaviour.

I wasn't.  They knew what they wanted, the problem was well-defined,
and that community is oriented to correctness-by-design.

Note that Emacs is none of those (google for xwem.el and Emacsspeak
and tell me again anybody knows what Emacs users want and the problem
is well-defined :-), and the first two "is nots" are inherent in the
problem domain.  The third could be changed, but seems unlikely.  The
"kaizen" style (continuous improvement and extension of a simple idea
and initial implementation by dynamic hacking) has served the Emacs
community well so far.