>>>>> "Niels" == Niels Freimann writes: [...] Niels> However one thing must be clear: Any future development must Niels> place gtk into the very center. Absolutely not. If anything, future development should focus on making it really easy to switch toolkits. (Disclaimer: I am not an emacs developer. I am also not trying to influence emacs developers; I believe that they know what they are doing.) What happens if you lock yourself into GTK, and GTK becomes obsolete? Or GTK3 comes out and is API incompatible with GTK2 (much like what happened between GTK1 and GTK2). The best way to make sure that you'll be able to switch to the future toolkit is to maintain support for multiple currently existing toolkits. If you ditch support for Xt, motif, ncurses, etc. it becomes very easy to dig yourself into a GTK2 hole that will be very hard to get out of if you ever need to switch to anything else. By keeping the other toolkits, you know where all the pitfalls will be when you ever want to use something else. I agree that GTK support is important, but good GTK support is not mutually exclusive with supporting other toolkits, even ncurses. One of the reasons that I chose gnus as my mail reader is because I could always ssh into my computer to check my mail. My main emacs use is in graphical mode, but I'm really thankful that I have the option to use text mode if I ever need to. And don't forget all those blind users who use emacsspeak, and have no real need for GTK support. [...] Niels> Emacs must look and feel like any other gnome, kde, or window, Niels> application. Yes. And how is it going to look and feel like a KDE or Windows (or Mac OSX, or even CDE) program if it just uses GTK? In fact, Emacs seems to be doing pretty well in this area already. In Windows, if I click on File | Open, I get a Windows file selection dialog. (At least I did the last time I used NTEmacs, about three years ago.) In Linux, under GNOME, if I click on File | Open, I get the GTK file selection dialog. It looks to me like supporting ncurses isn't having any negative effect on GTK support. [...] Niels> To be polemical: our competition isn't vms or something, but M$ Niels> windows. Our competition is not Windows. In fact, emacs runs just fine under Windows. -- Hubert Chan - http://www.uhoreg.ca/ PGP/GnuPG key: 1024D/124B61FA Fingerprint: 96C5 012F 5F74 A5F7 1FF7 5291 AF29 C719 124B 61FA Key available at wwwkeys.pgp.net. Encrypted e-mail preferred.