Subject: Re: bug#52795: 29.0.50; pgtk: issues with key bindings

From: Kévin Le Gouguec <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 26 Dec 2021 15:25:45 +0100

Po Lu <[email-masked]> writes:

> Kévin Le Gouguec <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> On all of these, Emacs's "classical" X11+GTK configuration works fine;
>> other applications work fine too; the problems I describe only show up
>> in Emacs compiled --with-pgtk.
>
> WDYM by other applications?  Are those GTK+ applications, and do they
> treat S-SCP differently from SPC?

Off the top of my head (testing on XFCE, because that's all I'll have
for the coming week):

- with Firefox, as in special-mode-map, SPC scrolls forward and S-SPC
  scrolls backward,

- in Libreoffice Calc, SPC self-inserts, S-SPC selects the current row,

- XFCE's keyboard shortcut manager allows binding Shift-Space.

I don't know how much those rely on GTK+; possibly they do something
similar to Emacs's X11+GTK configuration?

> OTOH, if you're running X, I recommend you use the regular X port
> instead.  It will work much better in general, thanks to not having to
> work around crazy limitations of GTK (child frame performance
> immediately comes to mind.)

Right; that was my uninformed conclusion so far.  All my setups run X
for now, so I can keep running the X port, although I'm slightly miffed
by the fringe icons being so tiny on screens where I crank up DPI
scaling; afaict --with-pgtk handles this better.

I'm also idly curious about these GTK limitations; are they documented
somewhere (either Emacs-side or GTK-side)?  When researching this S-SPC
issue, I tried to search for developer manuals and bug trackers, but the
only relevant results that showed up were Emacs related (that's how I
found out about the pgtk-use-im-context-on-new-connection /
pgtk-use-im-context knobs).

Thanks for your clarifications; setting aside my question on GTK
limitations, and my issue with fringe icons shrinking when increasing
DPI scaling (that would be… bug#37932, at first glance?), this can be
closed I guess?