Re: bug#51251: 29.0.50; Moving cursor on top of raised box leaves artifacts around in NS port

[Alan Third]

On Sun, Oct 17, 2021 at 09:14:39PM +0800, Po Lu via Bug reports for GNU Emacs, 
the Swiss army knife of text editors wrote:
> 
> (BTW, I'm noticing a general lack of interest in the NS port, where
> features from the other ports can take months or even years to land,
> especially WRT to GNUStep support.  If there's a list of TODOs with the
> NS port, please let me know.  I'd be happy to help bring it up-to-spec.)

I'm not aware of a TODO list. There are some in etc/TODO but I don't
think it's up to date.

One place to look is bug reports tagged "ns", but that is not an
exhaustive list of NS related bug reports (and some aren't really
anything to do with the NS port, they just happened to be spotted on a
Mac first).

M-x debbugs-gnu-usertags C-s ns <RET>

You'll notice a distinct lack of bug reports about missing features
since it appears nobody cares enough about, say, the missing tab bar
to raise a bug report.

Some of the problems with the NS port (like terrible thread support)
are, IMO, down to its architecture and require quite extensive work to
fix. I've started cleaning up the codebase in preparation for some
large fundamental changes, but I'm not convinced my plan is correct.
I'm not a professional developer, so my ideas about refactoring may be
questionable, and I haven't ever worked on any other *step code.
Additionally I'm not sure it's really a good idea for me to make these
large changes since then anyone who is already familiar with the
codebase will have to relearn it and I'm not sure they'll make it
easier to understand.

Have a look at scratch/ns/testing for some clean-ups to do with
colours.

If you want to improve the GNUstep experience I think the best place
to start would be improving nsfont. I've tried, but frankly I don't
understand fonts and my motivation ran out pretty quickly, especially
since some of the GNUstep side is completely undocumented.

Anyway, help with the NS port is always appreciated.
-- 
Alan Third