Re: Emacs as a desktop environment

[joakim]

Ted Zlatanov <address@hidden> writes:

> I've been very frustrated lately with the memory and resource use of
> gnome-panel, XFCE, and the new Unity UI in Ubuntu 11.04.  They use
> multiple megabytes of memory for trivial things; they are slow, and they
> make a machine with 3 GB of RAM feel slow just doing trivial things.
>
> I think GNU Emacs, at least on GNU/Linux systems, can provide much of
> the desktop environment functionality, so Emacs + a window manager like
> XMonad is a full desktop experience:
>
> - launch bar: a place to put icons associated with a program (simple toolbar)
>
> - Applications, Places, and System menus: not sure how to connect those
>
> - load indicators (CPU, memory, network load, etc.): can be done with SVG
>
> - date, weather, market indicators: SVG and/or plain text
>
> - workspace indicator: needs to talk to the window manager
>
> - all file management: Dired
>
> - icon dock for application and system indicators
>
> I'd like to know how much of this can be achieved with today's GNU Emacs
> plus the external packages (GNU ELPA, Tom Tromey's ELPA, EmacsWiki,
> etc.) available, and how much will require new packages or changes to
> Emacs' internals.

You can have a look at the Xembed branch. Its not functional ATM but the
README describes it pretty well I think. What its supposed to do is
allow embedding of applications inside Emacs. Then you wouldn't need a
WM at all :)

I've also been wanting to rewrite the SVG support to use the Cairo
renderer. The current 2 renderers both wind up in librsvg and generate
bitmaps that gets copied a lot. So its slow and memory intensive which
it doesn't havoc to be if you look at Inkscape for instance. This would
also be much simpler if I could get the Xembed branch to work well. The
last thing I was going to do before life stalled me indefinitely was to
allow for a simplified embedding that was owned by a single emacs
window. That should be pretty robust I think and does not exclude the
more advanced possibilities of the branch.



>
> Thanks
> Ted
>

-- 
Joakim Verona