Re: Emacs, QT and Cairo

[Chad Brown <yandros@MIT.EDU>]

On Jul 14, 2010, at 12:29 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> A `truly excellent' effort in this space would almost certainly require a huge amount of work from at least one of the already generous/overburdened developers who truly understands the redisplay internals, and I would be surprised to hear that any such feels that they have the free time to devote to such a blue-sky project.
> 
> You are looking at the problem from the wrong angle. [...]

> The starting point is, of course, a thorough study of the current
> display engine.

I'm actually not looking at it as a problem to be solved at all, but rather as a blue-sky project to investigate what might be possible with new display toolkits.  By way of example, in past discussions about using systems like (but not exactly) khtml, gecko, or gnome's canvas with emacs, it was suggested that emacs had certain requirements that such systems could not meet.  My guess is that while this is still true to some degree, there might be new systems that could get along with emacs' needs, and that might offer features not currently available to emacs.

Since my above wording might have been unclear, let me try again:  I expect that this request will demand too much time and effort to be viable for the people that already have the expertise required.  I was hoping for some partial effort, such as a document, discussion thread, or short ``as I remember it'' essay that might provide a good starting place.  I was expecting (since this is potentially a lot of effort for a blue-sky project) something more akin to your ``start by thoroughly studying the current display engine''.

Thanks for your time,
*Chad