Re: a wishlist [Re: getting things moving]

On 2003-08-01 CE ozan s yigit wrote,
> * determination and fix of capslock bug. i suspect a subtle semantics bug
>   somewhere in the libXg, but hard to tell. bug is manifested on anything
>   that uses libXg on *bsd/linux platforms vis a vis xfree86. does not
>   show on solaris
> 
> * libXg et al. changes for properly anti-aliased fonts, in keeping with
>   plan9 implementation as much as possible. must run on solaris, linux
>   and *bsd with minimal number of extra packages.
> 
> * libXg/libframe/et al. code cleanup. 

Speaking as the author of the Xft patch, I have given some thought to
updating the graphics and X11 bits to support colors, antialiased fonts
and double buffering (no flickering when scrolling).

I would do this as a complete rewrite, scrapping the existing libXg.
The core wily code would use libframe and a handful graphics calls to
draw the scrollbars, borders and boxes. The input event loop would also
need rewriting, since I do not want to use Xt.

The result would be prettier, but since it would use double buffering and 
no core X11 fonts it will use more memory and be a fair bit slower when
run on a remote display. Not sure how this would affect those who want to
use wily on older machines, but my feeling is that it won't pose a problem.

With the new graphics layer, porting to non-X11 platforms will be a
piece of cake so native MacOS X and Win32 wilys could be within reach.

I am willing to spend some time on this, but only if it will be part of
the mainline wily distribution. Let me know what you think.

> * adopting newly released plan9 libraries (eg. libfmt) where possible,
>   *except* the regex library. [this regexp library is special, see
>   below]

I tried a compile with the newly released plan9 libutf and encountered
no problems. libfmt is only used in one place in wily for one error message...

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