Emacs' GNU Look: A Sneak Preview of Emacs 21.0
A Superficial Rundown
Michael Hall
Monday, December 18, 2000 11:01:24 AM
On starting the program up, I immediately understood where the rumors
of Emacs' GNOMEification had come from: where the program used to
present a very sparse, black and white window with simple, unadorned,
menus it now has a toolbar providing a set of basic buttons familiar
to anyone who's ever used GNOME or a GTK app. The splash
screen, I also noticed, showed something besides fixed-width fonts for
a change: Emacs has support for scaled, proportional fonts.
One of the changes to Emacs 21, according to the News document that
ships with it, is that it can now take advantage of X toolkits if
present. It lists support for Lesstif/Motif as well as Lucid
and Athena widgets (and Xaw3d). Consequently, the menubar and the
tool bar look more finished. The program does not, however, use GTK
at this time. With the right icons, though, it would be easy to make
Emacs look quite a bit like a GNOME app, or, for that matter, a KDE app.
The toolbar is the function of some very simple Lisp.
(define-key global-map [tool-bar shell]
'(menu-item "Shell" shell
:image (image :type xpm :file "~/gnome-term-linux.xpm")))
in my .emacs file, for instance, produced an icon on the toolbar
that invokes the Emacs shell buffer. Obviously, much more elaborate code
can be substituted to make it worth the user's while to remove her
hands from the keyboard long enough to click a button.
The addition of graphical cues extends to a few other areas of the
software. The speedbar, for instance, now uses folder icons to denote
directories instead of + and - symbols. Because of the raised
look of the bars separating frames, it seems more likely people might
try to "grab" them and resize them.
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