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Re: Will Emacs support GTK4? Future of Emacs on Wayland?

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On 2025-10-16, Mekeor Melire wrote:

> If I understand correctly, GNU Emacs currently requires GTK+
> version 3.  Meanwhile, GTK4 has been released in December 2020,
> i.e. almost five years ago.  I'm not an expert of GTK4 but it
> seems to improve support for Wayland.  For example, etc/PROBLEMS
> mentions this[1]:
>
>> PGTK build of Emacs running on Wayland doesn't recognize Hyper
>> modifier.  [...]  The reason is that GDK 3.x doesn't recognize
>> the Hyper key modifier.  Since GDK 3.x is no longer developed,
>> this bug in GDK will probably never be solved.  And the Emacs
>> PGTK build cannot yet support GTK4, where this problem is
>> reportedly solved.
>
> But GTK4 has also disadvantages: Its support for X11 has been
> deprecated in Feburary 2025[2]:

GNU Emacs now requires GTK+ to run under X11? (And no, I don't mean "I
can run it in a terminal emulator", I mean it at least used to have
other windowing options besides GTK+.)

>> The X11 and Broadway backends have been deprecated, as a clear
>> signal that we intend to remove them in the GTK 5.
>
> I also heard people claim that GTK4 doesn't care about API
> stability, so any 4.x release might have breaking API changes.
>
> I haven't yet seen any discussion on GTK4 for Emacs in the mailing
> lists, so I'm eager to hear your opinions!  Should Emacs support
> GTK4?  How do you imagine Emacs' future support for Wayland?

Where compatible, GNU Emacs supporting also Wayland parallel to GTK+,
other graphical libraries for X11 and terminals and terminal emulators
would... just be GNU Emacs, I guess?

I at least see its ability to support these different media as a
feature :-)

-- 
Nuno Silva

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Will Emacs support GTK4? Future of Emacs on Wayland? Mekeor Melire <mekeor@posteo.de> - 2025-10-16 13:50 +0200
  Re: Will Emacs support GTK4? Future of Emacs on Wayland? Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@parhasard.net> - 2025-10-16 14:40 +0100
    Re: Will Emacs support GTK4? Future of Emacs on Wayland? John McCue <jmclnx@SPAMisBADgmail.com> - 2025-10-16 23:29 +0000
      Re: Will Emacs support GTK4? Future of Emacs on Wayland? Mekeor Melire <mekeor@posteo.de> - 2025-10-17 16:07 +0200
        Re: Will Emacs support GTK4? Future of Emacs on Wayland? Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> - 2025-10-18 10:28 +0100
          Re: Will Emacs support GTK4? Future of Emacs on Wayland? Mekeor Melire <mekeor@posteo.de> - 2025-10-20 15:02 +0200
    Re: Will Emacs support GTK4? Future of Emacs on Wayland? Mekeor Melire <mekeor@posteo.de> - 2025-10-17 16:19 +0200
  Re: Will Emacs support GTK4? Future of Emacs on Wayland? Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-10-17 02:39 +0000
    Re: Will Emacs support GTK4? Future of Emacs on Wayland? Mekeor Melire <mekeor@posteo.de> - 2025-10-17 15:50 +0200
  Re: Will Emacs support GTK4? Future of Emacs on Wayland? Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> - 2025-10-17 09:51 +0100
    Re: Will Emacs support GTK4? Future of Emacs on Wayland? Mekeor Melire <mekeor@posteo.de> - 2025-10-17 15:49 +0200
      Re: Will Emacs support GTK4? Future of Emacs on Wayland? Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> - 2025-10-18 00:05 +0100

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