| ▲ | iLemming 15 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. --- ¹ https://mathstodon.xyz/@divyaranjan/117104660983147041 ² https://github.com/minad/doom-on-emacs | ||