Emacs is not a Proper GTK Application

I got reminded yesterday that Emacs is not a proper GTK application after installing Windows 11 to make use of its built-in support for Linux GUI apps running in WSL. Windows uses Wayland/Weston and the results are great with native GTK apps like GEdit, but unfortunately HiDPI scaling doesn’t work properly with Emacs. Bummer!

Emacs 29 should fix this, as it introduces a pure GTK front-end (a.k.a. pgtk).¹ You can learn more about it from this presentation.

I’m wondering whether to build Emacs 29 from source or not, so I can get it sooner. In the mean time my old setup based on X410 continues to work really great and I guess I’ll stick to it for now.

At any rate - it seems that the ultimate Emacs experience on Windows (and Linux) is right around the corner.

1. Note that as of Dec 2021 Emacs 28 is yet to be released. Work on Emacs 29 has just started and it will probable be a couple of years until it is released. ↩

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