reddit / emacs

"People using X should _never_ use PGTK. The regular X build does a much better job at supporting that than PGTK ever will." --PGTK core developer

spwhitton · 2022-04-19 02:50
spwhitton · 2022-04-19 02:51
There seem to be quite a few people who think that pgtk is a straight upgrade even for those who are only using X. So, wanted to share this a bit more widely. I also just committed new text to INSTALL saying as much.
9bladed · 2022-04-19 03:23
Interesting, thanks for sharing. Admittedly I've been using pgtk on X for about as long as native-comp was available. I think I did notice a nice change from just native-comp to including pgtk, but given how much was in flux back then I can't say for sure what it was due to. But in the time since then I've had zero problems. I do run just a plain WM and use xmodmap (nothing exotic, just a few key switches) too. But I'll try without pgtk next anyway.
manphiz · 2022-04-19 03:44
My previous impression of the PGTK discussion is that it supposedly solved the resume window crashing issue when using GTK. Now I wonder whether that's still true.
frozeninfate · 2022-04-19 04:50
Same here. I've been using PGTK since it was merged, which has been nice as before I used to have to configure font size per device. Now my one font size setting scales appropriately for each device.
reini_urban · 2022-04-19 04:53
No, that's still there. it's an emacs problem, not GTK
[deleted] · 2022-04-19 04:59
[deleted]
c256 · 2022-04-19 06:47
You have it inverted: it’s a GTK problem deep in GTK. A GTK library call aborts in a certain condition, without giving the client the chance to do anything. Emacs is pretty much the only client that uses multiple displays this way with any regularity, so the GTK people don’t want to complicate their code enough to make it possible to fix it. There are detailed deep-dives available on both the GTK bug tracker/forums (although the bug is ancient and WONTFIX now, so you have to look at the old trackers) and on emacs-devel.
White86ec · 2022-04-19 09:47
In wsl2 yes
Thaodan · 2022-04-19 10:34
Font rendering seems to be much better in PGTK for me. I think this comment summarizes the situation pretty good: >\>From the the time before pgtk got merged, I can't remember any wide discussion of it being wayland-only. Perhaps I misremember. I regularly use both X and Wayland, and having to have two emacsen (and remember to use the right one) just for that seems sub-optimal. Wouldn't it be better to have a single gtk3 backend? For users and developers and distributors? But maybe the problems is small, i.e. perhaps pgtk works fine on X, but doesn't currently implement a handful of things, which we can document? Then users can decide if they can live with that. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2022-04/msg01002.html
discursive_moth · 2022-04-19 12:03
Yes, (without WSL too), and unscientificly I think the rendering is better, but maybe it's placebo. Edit: Why is this downvoted?
paretoOptimalDev · 2022-04-19 14:32
I read that PGTK allows actually using emacs server as a tcp server remotely or something along those lines. Meaning at least for that purpose pgtk would be more stable for X users.
zixx999 · 2022-04-19 19:44
It did increase my IQ tho, but I am on Wayland
InternalImpact2 · 2022-04-19 21:32
Time to go back to motif 🤣
wasamasa · 2022-04-19 22:04
That is nonsense. Use `(setq server-use-tcp t)` to force TCP connections (which are used by default on Windows). Note that even with TCP, you need to do some networking to establish a connection to a remote Emacs server.
paretoOptimalDev · 2022-04-20 15:06
Found where I got the idea, my memory was a bit fuzzy on the details though: https://reddit.com/comments/trn4rd/comment/i2o9mdj