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Gutters and native widgets

Andy Piper <andy@xemacs.org>

Gutters are GUI components of an XEmacs frame. They can hold arbitrary text. This text does not change with buffer motion. There is one gutter on each edge of the frame. In theory scrollbars, menubars, and toolbars could be placed in the gutter instead of being given special status.

Native widgets are conceptually unrelated, but were convenient to implement at the same as the gutters. Instead of implementing GUI widgets via image glyphs and Lisp code, native widgets are implemented using the underlying GUI.

Status

I propose having them on by default and requesting the testers to turn them back on if they've explicitly turned them off, and try to get the widgets working properly on X. Note: This is not up-to-date. Several reviewers oppose this, including Martin and Didier.

The gutters and widgets are apparently stable for Windows NT (cygwin, mingwin, native).

Andy now says (conservatively) he doesn't know enough to say what will happen with the X version; he would be happy to default them to off in a release on X platforms. The progress bar and buffer tabs are the only applications still. On the other hand, Olivier (among others) likes them, and the people he supports are unanimously in favor. They're apparently rather popular on Windows. Bill would like to implement them with GTK widgets on the GTK platform. Ben says he may have time to help with them starting in January.

Open bugs

RM note: Some or all of these are already fixed but I need to update from XEmacs beta traffic.

• gnuclient crash
• slow progress gauge
• focus lost in custom
• window-pixel-edges not returning relative to 0,0

Other open issues

Andy: In terms of what needs to be done to the widgets apart from bug fixing, Ben did a list which I will try to dig out. The main things were:

• proper keyboard focus and traversal handling
• accelerator handling
• dialog type accelerators like Esc to close

Discussion

RM: Can we release an XEmacs with the widgets in it based on the current state now?

Andy: With widgets switched off under X - yes. To get the X stuff ok I need to fix a few more bugs, but I am getting through them slowly.

Closed bugs

None.