On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 10:16 PM, Michael Corral <[email protected]> wrote: > > Le 2015-06-01, Monsieur [email protected] a ecrit: > > On Mon, Jun 01, 2015 at 10:08:33PM -0400, Michael Corral wrote: > >>> Also, using Gtk (in my opinion) isn't the end of the world. > >> I think it would be the end of the world for me. :) > > > > I'm curious: Why? I presumed almost everyone would have a web-browser of > > some sort installed. And most browsers require some toolkit or the > > other. > > I use Firefox, which is based on GTK+, but I try to avoid GTK+ apps > as much as possible. The GTKStep theme makes it at least bearable. > > I like how lean mrxvt is; GTK+ would add some bloat.
Wow, what a can of worms I opened with an idle question trying to understand the original direction of development! Yes, a lot of people have a major toolkit installed but that does NOT mean it is a good idea to use it in mrxvt as noted by Michael. I also used to use mrxvt on a computer that was extremely slow. I had to have GTK installed to support a few other applications but avoided using them whenever possible because of how slow they ran. Of course, it should be possible to allow optional support for GTK or other GUI libraries. The trick would be an abstraction layer for GUI components. I have done this a few times with hardware abstraction in embedded software for satellites and if done properly the overhead is negligible. Unfortunately, the mrxvt code was not written with such abstraction in mind so it is likely a lot of code restructuring would be needed to support this. In a more general sense, software bloat is not good for the end user experience even if they don't realize it. Large toolkits also encourage developers to use lazy programming standards by providing easy to use generic routines (instead of developing efficient routines with targeted functionality). This again is bad for the end user experience even if they don't realize it. I would be among those opposed to seeing mrxvt tied to a big toolkit like GTK unless it were an optional component (e.g. mrxvt-gtk as a separate build configuration). David ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Materm-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/materm-devel mrxvt home page: http://materm.sourceforge.net
