Re: Motif support

[Arthur Miller]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2021 18:58:18 +0100 (CET)
>> From: xenodasein@tutanota.de
>> Cc: Emacs Devel <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
>> 
>> If I wanted to work on something like --with-x-toolkit=no but pretty and
>> customizable, using simple software rendering to run on all platforms,
>> is this something desirable?
>
> I don't think I understand what that means in practice.  GUI
> programming for drawing is inherently system-dependent; for example,
> the --with-x-toolkit=no build uses Xlib calls all over the place.  Can
> you explain how something like that can work on all platforms?

Games usually do all GUI drawing themselves. Doesn't gdk/gtk use Cairo
to render it's own gui on a surface so they are not dependent on any OS toolkit?

I am not an expert on Gtk, and I am sure there are many paths there to render a
GUI, but it was something along those lines if I remember when Wayland
development was starting up.

Blender for example also uses this approach to render entire GUI in the
application, and just uses low level stuff from the OS to open a window and
obtain drawing contexts, to deal with input, keyboard, mouse and such, but gui
elements such as buttons and menus are created and managed by Blender itself.