Re: SDL terminal type

Alcor <[email protected]> writes:

> Even this minimal level of maintenance is unlikely to last for a long
> time, especially after Gtk5 is released.
>
> The Gtk UI toolkit is a moving target, and, with it being actively
> developed, will continue to have new major releases in the future, so
> any reduction of coupling between Emacs and the UI toolkit
> implementation will be useful in easing future migrations.
>
> Cheers,

Speaking as a person who has ported Emacs to GTK 4, I would strenuously
recommend against it.  GTK 4.x was designed with even less regard than
was its predecessors for the requirements of programs, such as Emacs,
which make use of GUI libraries in a not merely superficial fashion.
One good illustration of this is that the GtkMenu* widgets were deleted
upon some trumpery pretext with vague allusions to the obsolescence of
X11, and replaced with a declarative system which is supposed to be used
by defining menus in XML.  It requires a new menu bar widget to be
created whenever the menu bar is altered, does not provide for some of
the button types capable of being defined by Emacs, and is cumbersome to
invoke in order to create menus manually.  This is antithetical to
Emacs's approach of only generating a menu when the menu bar itself is
activated.

GTK has already proved to have no promise as a long-term expedient for
supporting Wayland, and I suggest pursuing a terminal backend using the
Wayland APIs directly instead.  I have always intended to do so, but
there is a project at work preventing me from improving Emacs on Unix
systems.  Moreover, SDL generally supports keyboard input, input
devices, and input method editors poorly, as was discovered by Luanti
when they adopted it:

   https://github.com/luanti-org/luanti/issues/14545

And at least one of these modalities is the prop and stay of Emacs,
limitations in which are much less acceptable here than in a video game.
(GTK 3.x itself has a similar problem preventing `C-S-u' and `C->' from
registering which has been reported repeatedly.)