Sv: Emacs Survey: Toolbars

[arthur miller <arthur.miller@live.com>]

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You probably don't, because I certainly wasn't talking about decorations 🙂.  Why would I do talk about decorations?

> Emacs _is_ capable of displaying an empty buffer, you
> can easily see that for you self if you do "C-x b foobar RET".

Yes, an Emacs buffers of course. I have seen it, 20 years now 🙂.

I don't know if I expressed myself badly, I don't remember what I said and I am often too fast to type; but I
was talking about visual feedback to user: so called what-you-see part
in wysiwyg. When I say white rectangle, or at least some lines or some notification
to user when he/she is typing outside buffer, it is not about "decorations" it is
about visual feedback what is going on. Otherwise it is not much of a wysiwyg, isn't it?

> So I think the important question here is: what would we like/need to
> display "around" an empty text area?  Armed with that knowledge, we
> could discuss how to do that in Emacs (if we decide it's important
> enough).

Yes, I agree; and sure that feedback can be minimal, for example, Emacs could simply prevent
user from typing after certain width, and insert just ^L after certain height, but some feedback
is needed. Emacs could just draw a line on the right edge with pipe characters as I mentioned
before; but having a nice background representation of a page in form of a rectangle and some
support lines to show where margins are would be much nicer and give more of a wysiwyg feel.

> And we also have some decorations around the window and the frame, regardless
> of whether or not there's text displayed there.

Yes I know of course, but these are around frames and windows. Imagine an A4 page. It
would be nice if user have some visual cue where edges of the page start and end and so on.
Windows and frames can be resized, and they are buffer specific. A document can have many
pages. Users might also wish to resize window to show just part of the page maybe? I am not
sure how would you tie a window to page, but I am not so introduced to Emacs internals either.

I had thoughts to use a child frame to display a page and show just a part of a buffer in it, or to
use a buffer per page, but I don't think it is good idea. Maybe you see some other possibility.

> I also think that it is not wise to talk about page decorations before
> we actually have a WYSIWYG editor that can display formatted text.

You can already display formatted text. You have implemented it! Emacs draws italics, and bold, and superscripts,
different fonts and what not. It just has to be connected to a button! N. Rougier made awesome little svg library for
toolbars and now he posted little svg-icon library to download icons. It is justto create some nice svg buttons
and toolbars and connect it to those functions for text formatting.

Of course decorations are secondary, but visual feedback in a wysiwyg tool shouldn't be secondary; it is
not about decorations, it is about giving user feel and visual help to manipulate objects on the screen.

At least that was my thought 🙂.

Merry Christmass to all! <3
________________________________
Från: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
Skickat: den 23 december 2020 16:56
Till: Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>
Kopia: rms@gnu.org <rms@gnu.org>; ghe@sdf.org <ghe@sdf.org>; emacs-devel@gnu.org <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
Ämne: Re: Emacs Survey: Toolbars

> From: Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>
> Cc: eliz@gnu.org,  ghe@sdf.org,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2020 12:21:12 +0100
>
> One annoyance is also renderer which in Emacs can't draw an "empty
> buffer". Libre Office draws a white rectangle and some lines
> around. Emacs can't do that since we can't draw things in layers, at
> least what I am aware of (Mr. Eli? ).

I don't think I understand what you are saying, because you didn't
elaborate about the "white rectangle and some lines around" drawn by
LibreOffice.  Emacs _is_ capable of displaying an empty buffer, you
can easily see that for you self if you do "C-x b foobar RET".  And we
also have some decorations around the window and the frame, regardless
of whether or not there's text displayed there.

So I think the important question here is: what would we like/need to
display "around" an empty text area?  Armed with that knowledge, we
could discuss how to do that in Emacs (if we decide it's important
enough).

I also think that it is not wise to talk about page decorations before
we actually have a WYSIWYG editor that can display formatted text.
The decorations are secondary features, IMO, the perceived difficulty
in providing them shouldn't stop us from implementing "the meat" of
any word processor.

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