[gtk-list] A Super Text Widget Thingy

[Matt Gushee <mgushee havenrock com>]

Well, there are probably others who have greater knowledge on this
issue, but as a devoted fan of XEmacs (or any Emacs, really), I feel I 
have to say something about this:

pbg1854@garnet.acns.fsu.edu writes:

 > I was thinking about XEmacs, and how it allows you to embed it as a
 > widget inside your program, and I thought it would be really cool if
 > GNOME/GTK+ had its own XEmacs type text editor widget that was
 > completely scriptable, and acted completely consistently across
 > apps.

Yes, it would be cool. But do you have any idea how much work has gone 
into (X)Emacs? Some of the best minds in the free software world (RMS, 
Jamie Zawinski ... just for starters) have worked very, very hard for
years to make it what it is.

 > library. I know we could probably hack XEmacs to work with GTK+, but
 > it would probably be best to write one from scratch, to make it
 > seamlessly join in with the rest of GTK+ and GNOME.

I don't believe it's a matter of hacking anything, really. I'm not too 
familiar with the internals of XEmacs, but AFAIK the heart of the
XEmacs code base is very independent of GUI toolkits, and it
already supports several alternative widget sets.

 > Has anyone thought
 > about doing something like this before? I think it would be really
 > cool, and would be a great contribution to the GNOME project.

Perhaps. But what kind of contribution would it be to the Emacs
project? There are already two major Emacs development teams (FSF and
XEmacs, of course), and it's my understanding that nobody on either
team is very pleased that they can't manage to work together.

I hate to dampen your enthusiasm. As I said above, I agree it's a cool 
idea. If only all cool ideas were good ones ...

Matt Gushee
Portland, Maine, USA