Teaching an old Bovine Gnu Tricks: What's next for Emacs?
Tux Theatre | Sun 24 Jan 10:45 a.m.–11:30 a.m.
Presented by
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Jeffrey Walsh
@N/A
https://github.com/fejfighter
Jeff is a system software engineer generally found elbow deep in the crusty part of the codebase that needs work. When not screaming "why?!" at commit logs he is often seen on, around, working with or talking about bikes.
Jeffrey Walsh
@N/A
https://github.com/fejfighter
Abstract
In a rare positive of 2020, GNU/Emacs 27.1 was released with a heap of new features, bugfixes and performance improvements.
This was almost immediately followed by the usual Navel-Gazing and bike-shedding discussion that gets emacs-devel in the news.
Buried under the suggestions of new key-bindings, better user on-boarding and new languages that should replace lisp this time were discussions for features desperately needed to drag Emacs forward.
One such feature is the porting of Emacs to the Wayland display Protocol using GTK3. While seemingly simple at first glance, the history of the Emacs display engine would prove to make this a much more difficult task.
In this talk I will cover the motivations and significant challenges of porting Emacs to use wayland, shed some skeletons from the code base, show the current state of the system before considering, what should be next for an editor that keeps on going.
In a rare positive of 2020, GNU/Emacs 27.1 was released with a heap of new features, bugfixes and performance improvements. This was almost immediately followed by the usual Navel-Gazing and bike-shedding discussion that gets emacs-devel in the news. Buried under the suggestions of new key-bindings, better user on-boarding and new languages that should replace lisp this time were discussions for features desperately needed to drag Emacs forward. One such feature is the porting of Emacs to the Wayland display Protocol using GTK3. While seemingly simple at first glance, the history of the Emacs display engine would prove to make this a much more difficult task. In this talk I will cover the motivations and significant challenges of porting Emacs to use wayland, shed some skeletons from the code base, show the current state of the system before considering, what should be next for an editor that keeps on going.