Re: Feature change or bug - Emacs server

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

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2011/6/11 Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>

> On Sat, 11 Jun 2011 12:48:57 +1000 Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> TC> Of course, if emacs had a decent web browser able to handle javascript
> etc
> TC> and there was some way of having multiple virtual desktops, my
> .Xsession
> TC> would likely end with something like
>
> TC> exec emacs
>
> TC> In the meantime, I will experiment with various wm until I find the one
> that
> TC> is as light weight as possible while still providing all the features I
> TC> want. Then I will craft my own .Xsession and hopefully again reclaim at
> TC> least the feeling I know what is going on and am in control! If anyone
> has
> TC> any recommendations on non-GNOME (or KDE for that matter) wm they have
> found
> TC> good, I'd be i9nterested in hearing about it (possibly privately to
> spare
> TC> the list!).
>
> My work on Emacs as a desktop environment is exactly what you're talking
> about, I think.  Look at those threads, especially
> http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/139687 where I list all the
> things I think are needed.  I'm just starting now, should have a usable
> emacs-panel.el with functional tiles and some WM integration eventually,
> and then I will add the rest gradually (help is welcome, of course).
>
> I don't plan to replace the WM, but everything else is fair game.
>
> Ted
>
> Hi Ted,


Yes, I saw your posts regarding  emacs as a desktop environment. As someone
who was largely restricted to using emacs as my desktop environment (for
over 13 years, I was pretty much totally blind and used emacs with emacspeak
for nearly everything), I can appreciate where you are coming from. However,
over the last few years, this was becoming increasingly more difficult and
less adequate as more and more things moved to a web based environment using
javascript. As html5 rolls out, I suspet things will become worse.

There has been some interesting work done which tries to create a closer
link between emacs and a sophisticated browser, such as firefox. T. V. Raman
has done some really interesting work in this area which might be worth
looking at.

For emacs to really be a good desktop environment in this age, I think it
must have the ability to provide access to rich web content - content that
uses javascript, html5 etc. It would seem there are two possible approaches
to this - do the necessary work in emacs or provide some mechanism that
would allow emacs to access and possibly manipulate data that is already
partially processed by a web browser such as firefox or chromium.

As we can see from the lack of development with emacs w3, there does not
appear to be much interest in developing a full featured web browser in
emacs. Much of T. V. Raman's work has focused on using a web browser like
firefox to do the heavy lifting of processing the content, javascript, etc
and then providing an interface that emacs can use to obtain the final
result for display. Others have provided browser plugins to allow emacs to
provide editing support etc.

IMO for emacs to be a really useful desktop environment, it will be
necessary to provide some sort of web interface and is able to support rich
web content. I suspect that development and maintenance of a stand-alone
elisp package, similar to w3, is not practical and that the best result
would be to develop interfaces that allow browsers like firefox or chromium
to do what they do best, but allow emacs to access the results of their work
and to provide input so that emacs can drive the browser and 'cherry pick'
bits.

WRT things like an emacs panel, its not clear to me what real benefit such
things would have if you are looking at emacs as the desktop environment.
Essentially, what would an emacs panel provide for emacs that you don't
already have or is it just putting together what we do have in a more
convenient form?

Tim

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