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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

Emacs user for >32 years now. It's a pity this won't get merged. There is a big usability/accessibility factor to consider here: I really wish I could have something like the Ghostty cursor_blaze.glsl shader for highlighting where the cursor is when you switch windows/buffers/apps.

Most people think GPU equals silly toys like video in a text window, but there is much more to it than that.

[and yes, I know about beacon, which unfortunately doesn't work too well, as well as about pulse, which I use]

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GPU speedups are welcome, but you don't need a shader and a gpu to insert a flashy effect.

Emacs has had this for decades: `pulse.el`. And building your own is very simple also.

You'll still need someone to write the glue code to trigger the pulse, but then a gpu patch on the backend wouldn't give you that either.

I'm sure someone on MELPA/Github has written code to do just this already.

> Emacs has had this for decades

Pulse works, but honestly it pales when compared to neovim's effect. It would be nice to have a machinery to create things like that in Emacs.

I expected this kind of reply, which is why I specifically mentioned that I actually use pulse.

This attitude of "Emacs already has this" is not helpful and limits the development and evolution of Emacs. Have you seen how the Ghostty shaders work and how specifically the cursor highlighting one works? It is way better than what Emacs does today.

I would love to have something like nvim's "smear-cursor". iirc someone wrote a patch (it was posted on r/emacs) - I'll attach it if I find it. My first thought was "is it doable as a dylib?"

The feature is LLM generated, and also doesn’t bring any speed ups, only slowdowns

Did you read the article to the end? It does bring speed ups for high resolution, like 4K. It's at more conventional laptop display sizes that its roughly on-par with, but the GPU scales better with pixel count.

Only on Linux it seems. The fact that it makes rendering slower on lower resolution is a big concern.

I’m all for speeding up Emacs as a long time user, but I share emacs maintainers stance on not accepting llm code.

I'd be thrilled with a second thread much less GPU.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Ba...

I don't think video in a text window is a silly toy. Sounds like another useful tool in the toolbox.

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