Re: "Why is emacs so square?"

[Ulrich Mueller]

>>>>> On Wed, 15 Apr 2020, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> I think the difficulty here is to look "contemporary" and yet fit
>> every platform Emacs is run on. Button widgets look different on
>> each. Even between GUI toolkits. And change between releases.

> There are only 2 variants: native buttons (provided by some toolkit)
> or the ones we draw ourselves.  And there's no requirement that they
> all look the same, I think: they should have the look-and-feel of the
> toolkit being used.

Exactly, and I presume it would be somewhat hard to emulate the GTK+
look under Athena/Lucid or Motif. Also, what problem would it solve?

>> The other option, of course, is to look both modern and unique, but it's 
>> a harder proposition, especially without a graphical designer on the 
>> team. And this stuff gets outdated quickly.

> I think "modern and unique" is a contradiction of terms nowadays ;-)

"Modern" mostly means that everything looks like half-sucked candy.
Please resist that temptation. :-)