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Will Emacs support GTK4? Future of Emacs on Wayland?

From Mekeor Melire <mekeor@posteo.de>
Newsgroups comp.emacs
Subject Will Emacs support GTK4? Future of Emacs on Wayland?
Date 2025-10-16 13:50 +0200
Organization MB-NET.NET for Open-News-Network e.V.
Message-ID <87v7kft6af.fsf@posteo.de> (permalink)

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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]:

> 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?

[1] https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/8aeb4f82d915c6f7b552347ed93ed21d93afae07/etc/PROBLEMS#L522-L531

[2] https://blog.gtk.org/2025/02/01/whats-new-in-gtk-winter-2025-edition/

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Thread

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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