Xfce News
The little mouse told me...

The biggest gripe I’ve had with emacs — alright, besides the finger-breaking key combo’s ;-) — is that it is just plain ugly. It just doesn’t fit with my beautiful gtk desktop with anti-aliased truetype fonts. Gvim got this right a long time ago.

But, no longer does this have to be true:

I already knew about the gtk interface, but I never heard of the xft support. I got the instructions from EmacsWiki:

$ cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/cvsroot/emacs co -remacs-unicode-2 emacs
$ cd emacs
$ ./configure --with-gtk --enable-font-backend --with-xft
$ make bootstrap && make && sudo make install
$ emacs --enable-font-backend --font "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono-10"

In this blog entry Aaron Seigo talks about Plasma, the panel/desktop framework for KDE4. The ideas about data engines and data visualizations are really interesting.

I have been thinking about this for Xfce as well: it would be really cool if we could provide plugin writers with data sources and display widgets to easily write status monitors for the panel.

The idea I had is that the display widgets could be in-process, so it would be an internal plugin, but the data to display would be obtained and processed by an external process, through a DBUS protocol or whatever. This has the shared advantage of in-process widgets, which are a lot easier to handle (no more XEMBED, yay), and out-of-process data handling (no GUI blocking or crashing of the panel).

Of course we really should get Xfce 4.4 out before even considering the possibilities for 4.6…

Here’s a post by Ryan Lortie, who has been working on a (possible) new API for GNOME applets. The work was done as part of the Google Summer of Code and it looks very interesting.

It would be kinda cool if we could support the same API for Xfce 4.6. Most of the GNOME dependencies seem to have been dropped… or maybe, by the time we release 4.6, we simply switch to using the GNOME panel, who knows?

Or maybe I should be nice to our plugin writers and not change the panel API every major release :-)