Dick Hoogendijk wrote: > What are the main (dis)advantages of the GTK / Xaw toolkit versions? > I ask, because looking at the CBE version (the SFEemacs.spec) you have > to specify --with-gdk to build with the GTK toolkit. So, default is Xaw, > I guess. But why? >
Xaw is an ancient MIT toolkit that was written as a proof of concept for the Xt intrinsics toolkit back in the day. It's really old, and has a rather simple flat appearance (partially mitigated if you use Xaw3d instead). It's advantage is that is is available everywhere. No doubt, that's why it's the emacs default. GTK is a fairly modern toolkit that looks good on a Gnome desktop. It's main downside is that it may not work properly on all platforms. When I built the SUNWgnu-emacs packages for OpenSolaris, I found that 64-bit GTK for sparc would cause emacs to core dump. However, it was fine in 32-bits, and for both 32 and 64-bit x86. This is probably not a complex bug, and may even have been fixed by now. For the Solaris packages, my solution was to build 32 and 64-bit binaries for all the toolkits (other than 64-bit sparc GTK) and let the user decide what they want. That's also what Linux does. If you're building this for yourself, I'd say use GTK if you can, and use Xaw otherwise. Hope that helps... - Ali
