Re: Emacs plugin system & Gecko embedding

["R. P. Dillon" <rpdillon@gmail.com>]

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On Sun, May 4, 2008 at 2:19 PM, David Reitter <david.reitter@gmail.com>
wrote:

> A browser inside Emacs: do you agree that this would only make sense if
> all text editing was governed by Emacs, i.e. each text area was handled by
> Emacs directly as a buffer?
> (Is that doable with the new Gecko library?)


It would make the most sense to have the text areas in gecko governed by
Emacs.  It does complicate things, however; I don't think libxul provides
that level of transparency into what it renders, though I am quite ignorant
of both libxul and Emacs at the C level.  Of course, if libxul offered the
same plugin architecture that Firefox does, then a plugin like It's All Text
could be used to call emacsclient when editting text areas.  Seems a bit
like the snake eating its tail, but it may be a reasonable first cut at the
concept.


> In that case, why not have an extra port of Emacs that would provide a
> "text area widget" (and maybe more) to be used as library by other
> applications written in GTK/GNUStep/Cocoa/whatever frameworks?


This is a possibilty - my focus was less on Emacs as a text editor, and more
on the buffer management, search, window configurations (C-x r w) and kill
ring sharing that embedding would offer.  Of course, being able to edit text
areas in Emacs would be icing on the cake.

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