Re: "Why is emacs so square?"

[Alex Bennée]

Ulrich Mueller <address@hidden> writes:

>>>>>> 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?

Surely unifying under a single cross-platform toolkit like GTK+ would
avoid having this complexity. I still run lucid because there is a long
term bug in the GTK engine which I don't understand but gets loudly
reported whenever you run it. I'm not sure if this is down to the
toolkit or the thunking Emacs has to do to have a common command loop
shared between it's GUI and terminal invocations?

>>> 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 And this stuff gets outdated quickly.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. :-)

There is a danger in assuming everybody wants their experience to be
like ours. My personal config may be fairly austere and minimalist but
we should aim for the out-of-the-box experience to look nice and be
intuitive for new users. I've been thinking about text editors for my
children to use as they graduate from point and click programming to
proper text and even I'm not sure I want their first experience to be
Emacs.

-- 
Alex Bennée