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GNU Emacs Now Has Native Support For GTK Widgets (phoronix.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the one-tool-to-rule-them-all dept.

An anonymous reader writes: The GNU Emacs text editor now has merged the X Widgets branch. What this work allows is for embedding GTK+ user interface widgets within Emacs for features like landing MPlayer or a full web browser in Emacs. This allows now for more endless opportunities for the 40 year old GNU text editor. The X/GTK widgets support will come with GNU Emacs 25.1.

4 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. EMACS Memory Footprint? by superid · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I remember when you would say "Eight Meg And Currently Swapping" and that was a funny criticism of how bloated EMACS was.
    What's the mem footprint today?

  2. Re:Changing Userbase? by chipschap · · Score: 3, Interesting

    A very good question. EMACS tries to be all things to all people ... and it is. I've used it since almost the very beginning and can't live without it.

    That said, I'm not interested in the GUI stuff because it slows me down, and since EMACS is infinitely customizable I just turn it off. To each his own; some people like menus and so on. I do enable display of in-line graphics but no more than that.

    Yes, there is confusion over purpose and direction, but to somewhat justify it, I'll say this. Learning EMACS, which is a big job, is a lot easier with menus and a GUI interface to help get started. Over time you learn the keystrokes and become more efficient until eventually you don't need the GUI (but you can of course still keep it).

    EMACS is very much not for everyone, but for those who love it, it's indispensable.

    And one more little fact: on my Asus Zenbook, I typically get 5 hours running time with a mixed environment. But if I run EMACS and EMACS alone, in a full screen, I get 10 hours.

  3. Re:Old joke even more true.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why is it ridiculous?

    I've used emacs for 20 years almost purely as a text editor, though it was my email client for about five years. The beauty of emacs is that you *can* do almost anything, but it doesn't make you. If all you want is a text editor, that's all it is, and you won't even know it can do other things unless you try to make it.

    "Products" (word, firefox, etc...) will try to force you to use the new and useless (to you) capabilities with every release and prevent you from using it as the simple tool that you want. Emacs is the simple tool that you want first and foremost, and if you want more, it probably is that as well.

    It is perfect.

  4. Great news! by tamyrlin · · Score: 4, Interesting
    That is really great news. Good enough that I actually logged in to comment rather than commenting anonymously as I usually do. I've been following the xwidgets branch from the sidelines for some time but never bothered to build Joakim Verona's branch myself. It should be noted though that what was merged was not the full xwidgets experience, rather the xwidgets_mvp branch. This branch only contains support for embedding a webkit browser widget. (Although even that will be extremely useful I believe.)

    The xwidgets branch however promises even more. The main use case (at least from my point of view) isn't really to put normal widgets such as gtk buttons or sliders or anything like that in an emacs window. From my point of view the most important thing is that you will be able to embed whole applications using the GtkSocket widget. This means that you could, for example:
    * Have a good PDF viewer embedded in one buffer while you are editing latex source code in another and be able to easily switch between those buffers using emacs commands.
    * You could have inkscape running in one buffer and use normal inkscape editing commands for almost everything, except when you are editing text. In those situations you may want to use emacs commands instead.
    * You could have a *good* webbrowser running inside emacs to search for documentation online while coding

    Of course, the main xwidgets branch also opens up possibililties when it comes to prettyifying a lot of built in emacs applications. However, I don't find that very necessary in many cases. One of the main advantages with emacs is that (almost) everything is text, which means that you get a synergistic effect the more you do inside emacs.

    ; Witty end of comment for emacs aficionados:
    (animate-string "Congratulations to Joakim Verona for getting this merged" 10 10)