I have rebuilt Emacs 29 with PGTK in order to get Emacs running natively and to fix the fonts, and i already have another emacs 29 build (Lucid) installed with i use On X.
I was surprised to see Emacs on wayland was running slower than its counterpart on Xwayland. Also the fonts issue was not fixed.
While zooming in makes the fonts look better. On X i don’t have this issue.
Below is screenshots of fonts on Wayland - Xwayland and X
Recently I was reading #emacs and saw that some claim pgtk, or native wayland, is bodged and not feature complete. Is that right? If so, which is the best toolkit to compile from source with to run under XWayland?
From my own experience I’ve found no issues using pgtk on Wayland.
It’s feature complete but limited because Wayland is limited.
For example there’s no way for Emacs to know which frames are currently visible.
The author of the emacs pgtk code says that no one who has X installed should use pgtk – he’s stated on several occasions that if you have X at all then you should use a supported X toolkit in Emacs for best results.
I’ve seen counter-arguments that pgtk is still beneficial if you happen to have a “high DPI display”, but I believe that’s the only argument I’ve ever seen for using pgtk under X.
I always build
--with-x-toolkit=lucidmyself, and can happily vouch for that one. I don’t use Wayland, though.The issue is that the pure GTK port doesn’t have those functions that are based on Xlib such as frame properties that come from X11. Some feature specific to X11 that can be implemented purely with GTK are not implemented such as outer window id’s (I have a patch for that). So in theory the pure GTK windowing system could replace the GTK with X11 calls if it optionally allows the call of functions that depend on X11 if requested.
Pure GTK also allows the use of GTK input methods besides the better high dpi scaling.