Jeffrey Walsh https://lca2021.linux.org.au/schedule/presentation/48/ In a rare positive of 2020, GNU/Emacs 27.1 was released with a heap of new features, bugfixes and performance improvements. This was almost immediately followed by the usual Navel-Gazing and bike-shedding discussion that gets emacs-devel in the news. Buried under the suggestions of new key-bindings, better user on-boarding and new languages that should replace lisp this time were discussions for features desperately needed to drag Emacs forward. One such feature is the porting of Emacs to the Wayland display Protocol using GTK3. While seemingly simple at first glance, the history of the Emacs display engine would prove to make this a much more difficult task. In this talk I will cover the motivations and significant challenges of porting Emacs to use wayland, shed some skeletons from the code base, show the current state of the system before considering, what should be next for an editor that keeps on going. linux.conf.au is a conference about the Linux operating system, and all aspects of the thriving ecosystem of Free and Open Source Software that has grown up around it. Run since 1999, in a different Australian or New Zealand city each year, by a team of local volunteers, LCA invites more than 500 people to learn from the people who shape the future of Open Source. For more information on the conference see https://linux.conf.au/ Produced by Next Day Video Australia: https://nextdayvideo.com.au/ #linux.conf.au #linux #foss #opensource Sun Jan 24 10:45:00 2021 at Tux Theatre