an idea about managing menu-bar by Emacs itself

an idea about managing menu-bar by Emacs itself

[Kenichi Handa]

This is just an idea, not deeply considered.

I've just found that tooltip is created by Emacs itself as a
special `frame', not using any toolkit.  Then, how about
creating menu-bar and pulldown menus also by Emacs itself?
The immediate benefit is that we can display any non-ASCII
characters in the pulldown menu of Edit->Select and Paste.
In addition, perhaps the user interaction can also be
programmed by normal keymap.  The demerit may be that the
look&feel will be different from the other toolkit
applications.

---
Ken'ichi HANDA
handa@etl.go.jp

Re: an idea about managing menu-bar by Emacs itself

[Richard Stallman]

    I've just found that tooltip is created by Emacs itself as a
    special `frame', not using any toolkit.  Then, how about
    creating menu-bar and pulldown menus also by Emacs itself?

This has some advantages, as you've stated.  It also has some
difficulties or problems:

1. It would be hard to get the fast response people want when
they slide the mouse along the menu bar.

2. We'd need to add some display features--for instance, to display a
separator line.  We want to have this feature anyway, for word
processing, but someone still needs to implement it.

3. As you said, it would be inconsistent with the appearance
of typical toolkits.  However, that would not be a strong argument
against providing this as an alternative.

So if someone wants to implement the necessary display features
and then write the code for displaying menus, it would be
interesting to see if it performs adequately.