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Wayland Support (and More) for Emacs (lwn.net)
32 points by beermonster on Feb 11, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 10 comments



As someone deep into both Wayland and Emacs, I guess this is good news.

That said, for me the biggest problem Wayland solves is screen-tearing, which is most obvious when doing video, smooth scrolling and or panning.

And Emacs supports neither of those things :D

Also: I honestly thought most of that stuff was abstracted away from Emacs when you built it against GTK3, but maybe I'm mistaken.



Though things like this:

> There are a few things that will not be supported in the Wayland version, though. Xsettings has been replaced with GSettings, for example. Wayland doesn't support self-positioning of windows — that is left to the compositor — so Emacs is unable to support options that fix the position of windows.

will break some things in current Emacs packages. (E.g. what equake[1], an elisp drop-down terminal, does.)

[1]: https://gitlab.com/emacsomancer/equake


I'm using this copr build for about a year with Wayland and native compile support, and am wondering why it's still not merged. Looks very stable to me. But still better than Debian, where you got nothing.


Will I still be able to compile Emacs to use X and libXaw3D for the foreseeable future? Or is this some "modernization" effort to break what's old and works and force everybody onto GNOME's new hotness?


Emacs is open source. You will always be able to do that.

No one forces you to `git pull`.


> Emacs is open source.

I think the person you reply to is aware of that but is asking whether it's still available in upstream.

> You will always be able to do that.

There's a difference between the functionality existing and having to implement it yourself. It's unlikely to be trivial to do so even if it's open source, so your response is not helpful to answering the question.


> There's a difference between the functionality existing and having to implement it yourself.

Well, the functionality (use X and libXaw3D) exists, he doesn't have to implement it himself.


If I'm reading the article right, it's not as wayland or gnome specific fix, but a fix at the proper x11 level, generic and independent of the toolkit. That's referenced by the "(and More)".


Yeah, I saw that they implemented a new GTK/Cairo "terminal" backend. This is a good approach and helps to further decouple Emacs's editor core bits from its rendering bits.




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