The Gnomacs project - call for help

[Martin Baulig <martin home-of-linux org>]

[Disclaimer: This is for developers *only* who want to help with this
 project, there's no usable code for end-users yet.]

Hello guys,

As some of you already noticed, there's a `gnomacs' module in GNOME CVS
now which belongs to a cool little project I started last week in my
spare time.

It is the first version of a BONOBOized version of XEmacs.

What this is and what this is not:

* This is _not_ a GTK+ port of Emacs.
* It only works with XEmacs, not with FSF Emacs.

At the moment there's some basically working code in the `modules/gnomacs'
directory in the gnomacs module:

* This is a loadable XEmacs module (you need the latest developer's version
  of XEmacs to make this work) which has some basic Bonobo functionality.

  First, you need to start the CORBA server. This is done by starting the
  `xemacs-gnomacs-server'.

  Then, you can embed the "gnomacs-text-plain" bonobo component in gshell

  To do this, put the following into your ~/.gnome/mime-info/user.keys:

  ---
  text/*
        bonobo-goad-id=embeddable:gnomacs-text-plain
  ---

  Then you can load any text file in gshell to try it out.

* Normally, this should embed an emacs window in the gshell window.
  However, at the moment it simply launches a new top-level XEmacs window.

What needs to be done and how you can help:

* Someone needs to write some GnomacsFrame GTK+ Widget.

  This is the most important task for now and it is required to make
  XEmacs really embeddable. You can use the external widget code as a
  starting point, but it needs larger modifications so we can have the
  bonobo code in the xemacs process (at the moment external widget only
  works when used outside the xemacs process).

  I already tried to do this myself, but I'm simply not enough familar
  with Xlib and Gdk stuff to make this working.

  So we need some real Xlib/Gdk "guru" to write that widget.

As a next step, and when Desktop::Editor is finished, I'm going to
implement it Gnomacs.
  
Comments are welcome.

-- 
Martin Baulig - martin@home-of-linux.org - http://www.home-of-linux.org