Re: "Why is emacs so square?"

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Alex Bennée <address@hidden>
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>, address@hidden
> Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2020 11:14:21 +0100
> 
> > 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.

GTK+ is not cross-platform, it works only on some of the platforms we
support (and is not an easy toolkit to work with, based on our
experience).

> 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

This is because GTK+ has a bug that AFAIR they don't intend to fix
because they don't consider our use of GTK+ important enough (or
correct, for that matter).

> or the thunking Emacs has to do to have a common command loop shared
> between it's GUI and terminal invocations?

Not sure what thunking did you have in mind.  The handling of input in
Emacs should consider both GUI and TTY inputs, since otherwise you
will be unable to have both GUI and TTY frames in the same session,
and the likes of "emacsclient -t" won't work.