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50% Positive

Analyzed from 260 words in the discussion.

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#emacs#buffer#https#com#image#canvas#enable#graphics#things#headless

Discussion (3 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

spudlyo•about 5 hours ago
The headline comes from the most recent post in the thread from Eli Zaretskii:

> Thanks, this is now installed on the master branch, and I'm therefore closing this bug.

Good news! This will enable a bunch of future in-buffer graphics features -- things like Headless/Playwright Chromium using Emacs as a display server or faster PDF viewers. Org-babel should be able to make use of this too for faster data plotting. I can only imagine the kinds of snazzy Emacs graphical UI interfaces this will enable, beyond what is being currently done using SVG hacks for rendering.

iLemming•about 5 hours ago
/r/emacs discussion https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1vpufnu/the_emacs_ca...
iLemming•about 5 hours ago
Announcement¹

What it is: a new image type, canvas, backed by an in-memory ARGB32 pixel buffer.

Why it's a big deal: the old way to get pixels on screen was render -> encode to PPM/PNG -> allocate a unibyte Lisp string (or write a temp file) -> create-image -> Emacs decodes back to pixels. Canvas deletes the round trip: the module writes into the buffer Emacs displays from. On Cairo that's a single memcpy into the surface.

Things people have already built on it:

- doom-on-emacs, via doomgeneric²

- PALE, 1080p60 video in a buffer³

- embr.el, headless Chromium streamed into a buffer over CDP screencast. Author says canvas is what took it from toy to usable⁴

- emacs-reader, the PDF viewer that motivated the whole thing.

Other possibilities this opens up:

- Notebook-style documents, live plots embedded in an ordinary editable buffer, instead of regenerating a PNG per frame.

- Live profiling and debugging views: heap graph updating in real time.

- Whiteboards, freehand annotation, stylus note-taking - excalidraw-like stuff in Emacs.

- Emulators, music visualizers, sheet-music and circuit editors, image editors, dynamically generated icons, modeline graphics, etc.

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¹ https://mathstodon.xyz/@divyaranjan/117104660983147041

² https://github.com/minad/doom-on-emacs

³ https://codeberg.org/monadicsheep/pale

⁴ https://github.com/emacs-os/embr.el