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This is worth undertaking. macOS's stricter approach to handling some questionable hacks in Emacs could improve the codebase across all platforms. The PGTK frontend for Emacs (the Wayland-native frontend) was derived from the macOS version for instance. It replaced much of the messy X11 code with a cleaner, more modular Cairo-based frontend, which could be further enhanced by adopting a cross-platform, more future-proof SDL toolkit.

https://appetrosyan.github.io/posts/emacs-widget

Hopefully, similar improvements can address the issues with large locks and the lack of proper threading.



The problem with the PGTK frontend is it is notoriously EXTREMELY slow. The latency on user input compared to the X11 (especially Lucid) version has some people reverting back to X11/Lucid.

When I do run Linux I run Wayland, I daily drive macOS, but better than both are what you already allude to: the Emacs widget toolkit which will focus on replacing the GUI frontend with SDL and also (equally potentially) introducing an actor-type framework (akin to BEAM's) for communication to decouple that GUI.


It's not just slow, it's also broken.

Maybe broken is the wrong word, but it handles chained chords differently and it breaks my workflow at least.

(C-s s C-s for instance needs you to release and press S again when lucid doesn't need it)


I wonder how hard it would be to run the pgtk version on macOS


I run emacs on MacOS specifying the `emacs-pgtk` build in my Nix config as the package. Seems to work quite well for me




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