Re: High-res Customize icons

[chad]

I wasn't assuming a toolkit, but I didn't think to call out the differences, since the OP was asking about improving the display of Customize under macOS (which I used extensively until around January of last year). That same context is why I brought up xwidgets: because nswxidget exists, but isn't really stable.

As it turns out, the OP was more concerned about the "icons" that are probably better handled with fonts (similar to all-the-icons, org-bullets, and prettify-symbols-mode) than the buttons and dropdown-menus I (mistakenly) assumed.

While we're on the topic of portability, though: how (how well?) does the support for older Windows versions handle these sort of fonts? It's been decades since I had to look at code points, and that was mostly in the context of European language translations rather than "icons" or emoji. In particular, if the terminal doesn't support such fonts, does it degrade reasonably? Empty rectangles? Boxed numbers?

Thanks in advance,

~Chad 

On Wed, Apr 22, 2020 at 6:35 AM Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:

> From: chad <address@hidden>
> Date: Tue, 21 Apr 2020 22:47:54 -0700
> Cc: EMACS development team <address@hidden>
>
> Worth noting: If I understand correctly, the toolbar buttons are not the same sort of emacs item as the
> Customize buttons; the former are restricted specifically to the toolbar (and maybe the tab-bar, now?), and
> use a traditional GUI update/repaint/etc method, whereas customize buttons appear in buffers, and have to
> deal with the redisplay engine, as well as needing to work in both terminal and various-gui frames.

I think you mistakenly assume that tool-bar buttons always come from a
toolkit.  They aren't: Emacs is quite capable of drawing its own
built-in tool bar, and actually does this on MS-Windows (and in a
non-toolkit X build).  When that is how we show the tool bar, the
buttons there are very similar to the ones we show in Customize
buffers, except that we show images on the tool bar, something we
don't in the Customize buffers.

> It might be possible to use xwidgets to put gui toolkit buttons into
> buffers.

IMO, xwidgets are not sufficiently portable to use them as a basis for
prettier buttons.