The Ultimate Editor Widget -- ?

The Ultimate Editor Widget -- ?

[Paul D. Smith]

I know someone has already thought of this--heck I think I might have
even brought it up in the past myself.  But recent editing experiences
have prompted me to send this again.


In the past Emacs has been an umbrella application: people have
developed ELisp libraries to perform all kinds of tasks that required
text editing within Emacs itself.  So the unifying editor experience was
that you'd work completely within Emacs and all the various utilities
that required editing would be implemented in ELisp, and you'd have the
same editor commands for everything.

That worked well, and still does to some extent: I use Gnus and VM for
news and mail, etc.

But increasingly it is the case that technology is moving faster than
Emacs can keep up.  I will likely need to switch my email (at least at
work) to Evolution in the near future, so I can take advantage of
interoperability with Exchange.  Also I've been working on Wikis and
editing inside an editor's text box is a debilitating experience for
someone who's been using Emacs for more than 15 years :-/.


What I would love to see is an "Emacs server", that other applications
could talk to and request that a new editing window be created with a
specific parent, and various characteristics (font,
foreground/background color, etc.)  That way the Emacs window could be
swallowed by the invoking application and you'd have a complete Emacs
editor within whatever application (Evolution mail content window,
Galeon text editor window, etc.) wanted one.

Many of the pieces of this are already present in Emacs, of course, at
least combined with something like gnuclient which can have windows
invoked with different displays, etc.

I have no idea, really, what would be involved with providing an ELisp
interface to a function that would create an Emacs window that could be
embedded like that--and I know very little about X programming--but it
doesn't seem like it would be _that_ difficult.


Anyone want to take a shot at it? :)

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Paul D. Smith <psmith@nortelnetworks.com>   HASMAT--HA Software Mthds & Tools
 "Please remain calm...I may be mad, but I am a professional." --Mad Scientist
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   These are my opinions---Nortel Networks takes no responsibility for them.

Re: The Ultimate Editor Widget -- ?

[Eric Marsden]

>>>>> "pds" == Paul D Smith <psmith@nortelnetworks.com> writes:

  pds> That way the Emacs window could be swallowed by the invoking
  pds> application and you'd have a complete Emacs editor within
  pds> whatever application (Evolution mail content window, Galeon
  pds> text editor window, etc.) wanted one.

XEmacs can (or used to be able to) be built as an editor widget, in
Motif, Xt and X11 flavors; this is pretty much what you are
describing. I'm not aware of and support for this in GNU Emacs, though
possibly the work on the GTK interface makes it easier.
  
  <URL:http://www.xemacs.org/Documentation/21.5/html/external-widget.html>

-- 
Eric Marsden                          <URL:http://www.laas.fr/~emarsden/>