Hacker News Reader

Comment by aban | Hacker News Reader

Great news and congrats to everyone involved!

Among the highlights of this release is Xwidgets, which allows embedding GTK+ widgets inside Emacs buffers.

One such widget is WebKitGTK+, a full-featured port of WebKit for use in GTK+ apps. As a consequence of this you can now browse the internet and maybe watch some YouTube inside Emacs [0].

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/4srze9/watching_yout...

View on HN

Only yesterday I discovered I could play an adventure game in emacs. Then I discovered a bunch of layers and modes that were awesome. I haven't begun to scratch the surface, but if I buy a new Nexus 6P can I just flash Emacs on it?

A shortcut to dial a number from within an org mode phonebook would be perfect :)

With Twilio that should actually be possible.

You do not need to flash anything. It's already available on Android phones even without root. I use it on unrooted Nexus 6p.

Google "Termux emacs".

+1 for Termux.

I started using it purely for the novelty of running emacs on my phone (a moto x pure) and it's a great piece of software. It's even open source!

https://github.com/termux/termux-app

How do you use it? I couldn't imagine using Emacs with a software keyboard.

Volume up and down are used as modifiers. Sounds crazy but it works.

If using software keyboard, Hacker Keyboard works great!

Otherwise, the Logitech K380 Multi-Device Bluetooth Keyboard ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0148NPH9I/ref=cm_sw_r_other_apa_l... ) is great.

Have you asked your M-x doctor about it yet? ;)

A great way to discover things in emacs is the unmemorable command `finder-list-keywords` which gives you a menu of all the features in emacs by category

1. Isn't embedding a browser like this a security risk? 2. Can we now move M-x customize to gtk widgets?

Would it be any more of a security risk than using a stand-alone browser?

Standalone browsers make a lot of special efforts to isolate pages from one another. Does embedding have the same guarantees?

Yes. WebKitGTK+2 uses isolated renderer/host processes.

When you say "move M-x customize to gtk widgets", which text based would you replace with GTK widgets? Customize certainly doesn't initially seem as friendly as a traditional preferences dialog, but I would be hesitant to lose the "it's all text" navigability and consistency.

Having a friendlier, good looking "Preferences" based on gtk would help newcomers. We could keep customize too but a new panel with simple familiar look would help a lot of people to get into emacs.

Emacs is not only on GTK. I doubt any indispensable core components will depend on xwidgets unless it can embed each toolkit emacs can use. Further, customize is used on the terminal emulator and on the framebuffer too, having it require X is not feasible.

Xwidgets is little more than a gimmick, which:

+ Is not cross-platform and never will be

+ Depends on X and GTK (bad!)

+ Substantially reduces the stability of Emacs due to GTK memory leaks and bugs (terrible!).

This is also the reason that many Emacs users compile Emacs without GTK toolkit support on Linux.

+ Introduces serious security issues via the webkit part, and no, host/browser process isolation isn't really doing anything to mitigate this.

With all that in mind, I'm wondering why they bothered including it in the first place. It will never amount (at least I hope so) to anything that can be reliably depended upon.

I wonder if those widgets require GTK support in Emacs. I compile a plain X support for my emacs only, because with GTK it doesn't stay up for months without crashing. I had an emacs server with 180 day uptime the other day. Maybe on my work machine that is Windows anyway, I can try this out. :>

Yes, it does. Gtk3.

I would like to use Emacs on terminal, but few of keybindings don't work well based on terminal to terminal. For example, last three months I got a Mac for work, and on iTerm "C-/" didn't work for Undo, or some keybindings starting with "Meta". I guess that could be solved by configuring terminal properly with key sequences, but I just ended up using GTK (but well the GTK version crashed whenever I closed one of the multiple frame open). On linux, so far it has worked flawlessly for me.

I'm by no means an Emacs expert or even power user, but I've found Aquamacs to be pretty good for OS X. It's stable and seems to strike a good balance between integrating with native UI functionality and the Emacs way of doing things.

You don't have to use the terminal, and I assume OP isn't, either. Emacs still supports Athena and Motif widgets, among others, if you don't mind the looks.

I'm still on the GTK2 port, largely because I got sick of troubleshooting every GTK application after every GTK release.

If you're on OS X, it's probably worth checking out Aquamacs, too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com