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Butterflies use optical illusions to dodge predators

https://www.essex.ac.uk/news/2026/09/30/butterflies-use-optical-illusions-to-dodge-predators
1•gmays•1m ago•0 comments

Personal Computing 2.0: It's time for a personal computing revolution

https://ideas.imbue.com/p/personal-computing-20
1•raybb•1m ago•0 comments

LibDragon (N64): Explicit Anti-AI Contributor Stance (GitHub Issue)

https://github.com/DragonMinded/libdragon/issues/1012
1•some-guy•4m ago•0 comments

Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux kernel

https://lwn.net/Articles/1097401/
1•luispa•5m ago•0 comments

DoGBench: The first user-facing docs generation benchmark. No model scores >50%

https://dogbench.ai/
2•prithvi2206•5m ago•0 comments

LiveNerf Adopts MIT License

https://github.com/ninjahawk/livenerf/discussions/13
1•ninjahawk1•6m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I built a better way to browse and filter the NYT's 100 Best TV Shows

https://100besttvshows.madebyaqua.com/
1•felixding•7m ago•0 comments

Llmtobinary – a potential way to make LLMs generate machine code

https://llmtobinary.com/
1•thomasfromcdnjs•8m ago•0 comments

California issues investigative subpoena to OpenAI over rogue agents' hacking

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/01/california-opens-investigation-openai-hack
1•sbulaev•9m ago•0 comments

DockTerm: A notch mascot that tells you when Claude Code needs you

https://github.com/munvard/dockterm
1•moonlabs•9m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Proteus – Can DeepSeek Harness evolve itself to handle audio?

https://proteus-evolve.github.io/dsh-self-improvement.html
1•easonlu1017•10m ago•0 comments

Threadline: Open-Web Community and Identity Infrastructure

https://threadline-api-delta.vercel.app/
1•BillStan•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Pair.nvim – Agent assistance while staying in the codebase

https://github.com/sampsn/pair.nvim
1•sampsn•12m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Proteus – A framework for harnesses that evolve their own source

https://github.com/proteus-evolve/Proteus
1•easonlu1017•12m ago•0 comments

EUV Photomasks Are Getting Bigger [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7KcQ2yE6pM
1•mfiguiere•14m ago•0 comments

Apple's smart home camera reportedly won't record video

https://www.theapplepost.com/2026/10/01/72882/apples-smart-home-camera-reportedly-wont-record-video/
1•mikelgan•16m ago•0 comments

Auth factory – identity management running on Cloudflare

https://workos-demo-2en.pages.dev
1•measurablefunc•17m ago•0 comments

Message UI

https://imessage.swerdlow.dev
1•benswerd•20m ago•1 comments

Commadore64 vs. Nvidia GB10

1•spottedmarley•21m ago•0 comments

Show HN: PhreshOS – OS for Web Apps

https://github.com/PhreshOS/system
1•zouhirdx•21m ago•0 comments

MonoCode: GUI for Coding Agents

https://www.usemono.dev/
1•handfuloflight•25m ago•0 comments

Claude-Shaped Science

https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-shaped-science
1•acossta•25m ago•0 comments

Apple Mail on Mac May Stop Syncing Microsoft 365 Accounts Today – MacRumors

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/10/01/apple-mail-mac-stop-sync-microsoft-365/
1•absqueued•28m ago•1 comments

China's Crowded EV Car Industry Moves Toward Consolidation

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/28/business/china-ev-geely-nio.html
1•bookofjoe•29m ago•1 comments

Opal: NPM-compatible package manager in Rust with crash-safe installs

https://github.com/saintparish4/opal
1•sparish4•34m ago•0 comments

C64 Mercenary: a novel exploit bug in a 41-year-old game

https://gamesexplained.com/c64/mercenary/#lift
2•birdculture•35m ago•0 comments

Long-term nuclear waste warning messages

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages
3•dmschulman•38m ago•0 comments

2016 – 2026 – The Worst Decade Of Entertainment [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RG6BZyG0Afg
2•PorciiVorbesc•40m ago•1 comments

Cancel Your Subscription: a free browser game

https://www.fundrstudio.com/games/cancel-your-subscription/
1•kamphey•40m ago•0 comments

Texas Piloted AI Learning Tool in Public Schools over Education Board's Concerns

https://www.texastribune.org/2026/10/01/alpha-school-ai-texas-public-schools-mike-morath/
1•hn_acker•41m ago•1 comments
Open in hackernews

The Emacs Widget Toolkit

https://appetrosyan.github.io/posts/emacs-widget.html
48•signa11•1y ago

Comments

spit2wind•1y ago
There's also the Emacs Widget Library[1] (which I hoped this posted would be about). It's a plain text widget library that's quite powerful. Unfortunately (and surprisingly for Emacs), the documentation for it could use some love.

My understanding of the Widget Library is that it attaches various keywords and plists to a symbol which is considered the "widget". The library otherwise consists of functions that expect certain keywords on the "widget" symbol in order to perform actions or to be drawn on the screen.

The challenge is, the documentation doesn't clearly lay out what the keyword API is. This makes it hard to compose widgets in ways beyond what's shown in the docs.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/widget.h...

appetrosyan•1y ago
The idea is that we extend that and give it direct access to SDL. Such that we can e.g. run a shader in the buffer background, or allow you to have floating windows (frames) interacting with each other.

I am very aware of the advantages conferred by TUI and I seek to expand those to the GUI; not dumb-down to the level of modern GUI toolkits (that to be fair are dealing with a completely different problem). Hopefully, this can lead to some ideas being easier to implement from within Emacs.

_mlbt•1y ago
Somewhat off topic, but I love all the references to Led Zeppelin’s incredible song, Stairway to Heaven.
gudzpoz•1y ago
Personally, and contrary to the article, I do prefer Emacs's plain text widgets over more "GUI-like" ones. Plain text widgets minimize the differences between TUI and GUI Emacs and also inherently offer text selection, searching, copying, and pasting, which nicely integrates with Emacs. I mean, not many GUI frameworks let you place a cursor within a button and select its text, do they? I believe this is a unique advantage of text-based widgets: while other GUI applications require a dedicated mechanism for searching through their settings, text-based widgets allow you to use any text-searching packages to perform these actions.

Reading through the article, the author seems to be hoping for a pure GUI approach with Emacs-like navigation mechanisms, but I am not convinced that this can be as flexible as text-based widgets. However, for packages used exclusively within a GUI environment (like el-easydraw [1], which relies quite heavily on SVG-based widgets), it would be nice to have a dedicated GUI widget library.

(There was a discussion on Reddit about this a week ago [2], and I saw some comments defending GTK and PGTK that might be worth reading.)

[1] https://github.com/misohena/el-easydraw/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1kcgwme/the_emacs_wi...

appetrosyan•1y ago
Author of the article.

This is what I was referring to when I talked about "rich verbs".

Many people feel that way. The idea here is not to tell you that you're wrong, but understand what you want and do it better on the GUI side. TUIs can do a lot and we should recognise their benefits. GUIs can do that too, and can sometimes do better things.

The text-based widgets done graphically do the trick. We can add stuff that can't be done in a TUI and see if they give you anything useful. If it can be done with text widgets means that it can be done in principle. GTK can't do it, and that's why I'm leaving it behind.

> (There was a discussion on Reddit about this a week ago [2], and I saw some comments defending GTK and PGTK that might be worth reading.)

The author of those comments abused their power on reddit. I will not get into the weeds, just say that I'd be happy to respond to the critique presented here in good faith.

LargoLasskhyfv•1y ago
PSA: Use The Lucid Toolkit https://irreal.org/blog/?p=12672

https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1hlj04t/emacs_using_...

appetrosyan•1y ago
That's the best thing to do for the moment.
robobro•1y ago
404

Page Not Found

Sorry, this page does not exist.

You can head back to the homepage.

appetrosyan•1y ago
Hi. I just migrated my blog to Hugo yesterday. The correct link is:

https://appetrosyan.github.io/posts/emacs-widget/

robobro•1y ago
Why did you delete the page?
appetrosyan•1y ago
Didn't. I migrated to `hugo` and it trims off the `.html` at the end. The permalink is the same.
matt-attack•1y ago
I agree and only use emacs in the console and love it. With the advent of lsp modes and real time typescript and linting it’s fantastic. But one thing I don’t like about the console is when LSP mode is giving you an in-line error on the right side of the terminal it’s wrapped and beautifully interspersed amongst your code, but it’s impossible to select multi line errors in order to paste into tools like ChatGPT. Since selecting the error, also selects your code on the left side.

Anyone have a good solution to this ?