Why Emacs should have a good web-browser

[Stephen Eilert <spedrosa@gmail.com>]

[ Forgot to reply to the list. My bad ]



On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 10:29 PM, Miles Bader<miles@gnu.org> wrote:
>
> Paul R <paul.r.ml@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>> How about doing that the other way, that is rendering emacs buffers in
>> webkit (or an other xhtml/css+js lib), making it the default rendering
>> backend for emacs in graphic mode. It would probably cut off some large
>> amount of emacs plateform-specific code and make web integration tight.
>
> Please give more details about what you mean.  Emacs' display engine is
> not simple, and much code relies on its (many) features.  It would seem
> quit difficult to make it use a high-level display toolkit with very
> different abstractions.

I don't think there's any problem that Emacs doesn't look like a
"native" application. The problem is that it looks like an "old"
application.
If you take screenshots from Emacs and Textmate, both with their
"factory" defaults, Textmate looks *much* nicer (even though its
window consists mostly of text too). However, my heavily customized
Emacs looks prettier (IMHO) than the default, as does this one:
http://ozmm.org/posts/textmate_minor_mode.html

So, I think there are two issues here: first, better defaults. This
not only includes CUA-mode (even though I don't use it), but also XFT,
and the best font rendering we can get. Emacs 23 is close.

But it also needs more in the way of graphics. Even though Emacs
buffers *can* display graphics, their use is fairly limited(I see some
icons in Gnus, avatar faces in twit.el, line breaks, and the
speedbar). But these icons are small, not able to be changed in an
obvious way, are bitmaps, and are ugly.

So, we either need a better way to package graphics, as the preferred
distribution method seems to be EmacsWiki .el script files, so a
proper package manager. Or a way to create vector and bitmap images
programatically (some Cairo-like elisp library, or bindings for Cairo
itself).

I am a developer, though I've only hacked my personal .emacs so far,
but those are both interesting projects (package manager or graphics
library).


--Stephen

programmer, n:
      A red eyed, mumbling mammal capable of conversing with inanimate monsters.