Re: Long-term survival
"Stephen J. Turnbull" <[email protected]> Wed, 15 Dec 2004 12:22:03 +0900
| Newsgroups | gmane.emacs.xemacs.design |
|---|---|
| Organization | The XEmacs Project |
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
>>>>> "Andy" == Andy Piper <[email protected]> writes: Andy> At 03:38 AM 12/14/2004, Malcolm Purvis wrote: >> This is true, but is not the whole story. IMHO XEmacs' >> strength over Emacs has been its better integration with the >> surrounding desktop. In fact at the time of first release it >> was the best integrated X application around, showing everyone >> else how things like cut and paste and session management >> should be Andy> 100% agree Point taken, but I'm a text-oriented kinda guy. AFAICS the Services menu on the Mac is already supported on the Carbon port (although practically nothing else is :-). The GTK/GNOME/KDE file manager is just a widget that we wrap and call as usual. Those are actually straightforward, AFAICT. The hard work is going to be integrating a decent widget to Athena (Jamie suggests the gv filemanager, and I agree; I need to resurrect that workspace). Don't know about theme support, don't want to---except for keymaps, which I suspect ain't what you had in mind---I'll leave that up to you guys.:-) I don't think it should be near the top of our list, though, unless it's _really_ easy. To me, it's the bare-bones "all you need is X" stuff that will kill us. I already mentioned DnD, I nailed the "metacity maximize" bug last night (proof-of-concept patch coming soon), I've puttered about with XSM session management but desktop.el does enough, automagically enough, that it's hard to get enthusiastic. Closely related are the "internal" integration problems (eg, user modification of toolbars, tab control use by Lisp developers): the features we've already got are sadly under-accessible to the user/developers who contribute itty-bitty Lispy-things. And our killer app is the External Widget (aka KPart). If users could substitute XEmacsInside for the freakin' Firefox UselessTextThang, hey, we'd be #1 on sourceforge for the rest of the decade. So what am I missing? Am I totally without clue (possible, as I say text is my religion), or do we just need to add a few items to list I just gave and prioritize? -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.