You probably don't, because I certainly wasn't talking about decorations ๐Ÿ™‚. 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 ๐Ÿ™‚. 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 ๐Ÿ™‚. Merry Christmass to all! <3 ________________________________ Frรฅn: Eli Zaretskii Skickat: den 23 december 2020 16:56 Till: Arthur Miller Kopia: rms@gnu.org ; ghe@sdf.org ; emacs-devel@gnu.org ร„mne: Re: Emacs Survey: Toolbars > From: Arthur Miller > 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.