Re: GUI work (was: Graphical help browser)

[John W. Eaton]

On 25-Nov-2008, Michael Goffioul wrote:

| On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 7:56 PM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
| > On 25-Nov-2008, John Swensen wrote:
| >
| > | You can definitely use any editor you want, and if there was some way
| > | to put emacs into the IDE I would do it, but that just simply isn't
| > | possible.
| >
| > In the NEWS file from the current Emacs development sources, I see:
| >
| >  * Changes in Emacs 23.1
| >
| >  ** Improved X Window System support
| >
| >  [...]
| >
| >  *** Emacs now supports the XEmbed specification.
| >  You can embed Emacs in another application on X11.  The new command line
| >  option --parent-id is used to pass the parent window id to Emacs.  See
| >  http://standards.freedesktop.org/xembed-spec/xembed-spec-latest.html
| >  for details about XEmbed.
| >
| >  [...]
| >
| > Would that be sufficient to allow you to embed Emacs in a gtk
| > application?
| 
| You already know my opinion about this. While Windows support is not
| a target or a focus, I still think you should "consider" them when making
| architecture decision. Whether you like or not, Windows is the most
| widely used OS around the world. If you want to increase your user base,
| considering Windows as a possible platform is a win-win kind of thing.
| 
| Using a X11 solution for building an IDE for octave would de facto rule
| out Windows (non-cygwin) as supported platform. I know you don't care
| and I respect your opinion. But I personally think there are maybe better
| trade-offs.

I did not mean to suggest that embedding Emacs as the editor in an
Octave IDE would be the only way to go.  I see no reason to make it
overly difficult to write a useful IDE for Windows, just as I see no
reason to prevent doing things like embedding Emacs.  Can't we allow
both?  I don't necessarily object to having a default editor built
from some widget set.  But we should not force that on all users.  If
Emacs can be embedded, then I think we should allow users to replace
the default editor with Emacs.  If that solution doesn't work on
Windows systems today, then maybe someone will extend Emacs so that it
can work in the future.

jwe