Re: Motif support

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

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>
>> Cc: xenodasein@tutanota.de,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2021 18:26:41 +0100
>> 
>> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>> 
>> >> Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2021 18:58:18 +0100 (CET)
>> >> From: xenodasein@tutanota.de
>> >> Cc: Emacs Devel <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
>> >> 
>> >> If I wanted to work on something like --with-x-toolkit=no but pretty and
>> >> customizable, using simple software rendering to run on all platforms,
>> >> is this something desirable?
>> >
>> > I don't think I understand what that means in practice.  GUI
>> > programming for drawing is inherently system-dependent; for example,
>> > the --with-x-toolkit=no build uses Xlib calls all over the place.  Can
>> > you explain how something like that can work on all platforms?
>> 
>> Games usually do all GUI drawing themselves.
>
> So you are saying that so should we??
I'm not devil's advocate nor your enemy Eli. I don't say Emacs should do
this or that because someone else is doing it, or just to say it.

What I try to say is that it is possible to do gui on it's own. Emacs is not a
typical gui application anyway; it is not full of dialogs and views and what
not. Menus, toolbar and scrollbar are not very hard to do without external
toolkit, and since this thread took up that Emacs talks to numerous toolkits, it
may be pointed out that doing own thing might be a simplification of the code
base.


>> Doesn't gdk/gtk use Cairo
>> to render it's own gui on a surface so they are not dependent on any OS toolkit?
>
> Did you look at, for example, the MS-Windows back-end of the Cairo
> port to Windows?

Not really. I am quite sure they need to talk to the OS at some point, but
that is different to rely on OS to render menus and buttons, or just low level
stuff to open a window or blit ssurfaces.

>> Blender for example also uses this approach to render entire GUI in the
>> application, and just uses low level stuff from the OS to open a window and
>> obtain drawing contexts, to deal with input, keyboard, mouse and such, but gui
>> elements such as buttons and menus are created and managed by Blender itself.
>
> I don't understand what you are saying.  Should we use GTK or should
> we reinvent its code inside Emacs?

Emacs uses just small subset of Gtk, doesn't it? So if it wasn't for the look &
feel, as you said in some opening mail, because people want Emacs to look and
feel as the rest of the platform, Emacs wouldn't really need it?

I don't say you should use neither this or that. Emacs could probaly use only
Gtk to render it's gui on all platforms and remove other gui paths.

This thread was about Emacs talking to many different toolkits and someone
suggesting that situation could be simplified. I try to come med input, but as I
see, Motif is still important to someone. Is there Athena backend
somewhere still viable :)?

I am not trying to be devil't advocate, or annoying, I just believe that code
base would be easier to work and experiment with without so many different paths.