Re: Embedding Emacs in other apps

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

David Kastrup writes:
 > "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org> writes:
 > 
 > > Lennart Borgman writes:
 > >
 > >  > I think we are in a hurry. The Vim developers are also working on
 > >  > xembed. We must of course be first ;-)
 > >
 > > Forget being first.  XEmacs has had it since 1998 at the latest.
 > 
 > So either the feature's potential is overhyped, its use in the existing
 > XEmacs implementation is too complex to be used by a "typical"
 > developer,

The existing XEmacs implementation is very much a kludge; there was no
xembed standard at the time.  The major users are large corporations
in their internal distributions.  They presumably have special
applications that makes this useful.

 > or something else is amiss.

Well, yes.  What's missing in availability in Emacs.  Use of images is
a no-brainer, but it took Emacs 10 years to learn to display images,
so most libraries don't have facilities for them even today.

 > > Concentrate on being best, instead.
 > 
 > Based on your experience with XEmacs, would you have suggestions what
 > uses this feature has been _advertised_ for (perhaps it was so easy to
 > get in that no advertisement was needed and consequently nobody got
 > interested enough to try it?), and what made the advertisements, if any,
 > fall short in execution of their promises?

The big problem is that it requires substantial cooperation between
applications because (until xembed, which is a fairly recent standard)
the communication protocols had to be designed ad hoc.  And even with
xembed, it's not clear to me whether it will become more than toy for
developers.  What we'd really like, I think, would be a common editor
protocol so that you could just put

firefox*editprotocol: xembed
firefox*xembededitor: /usr/bin/emacsclient ! or /usr/bin/vim

in .XResources.  But xembed doesn't yet give us that.