Emacs canvas patch is on master

iLemming

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. --- 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

iLemming

/r/emacs discussion https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1vpufnu/the_emacs_ca...

spudlyo

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.