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Ask HN: Best Ways to Save on Taxes?

1•silexia•2m ago•0 comments

Methanol biotransformation for production of plastic monomer L-lactate in yeast

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65793-x
1•PaulHoule•3m ago•0 comments

Interesting things I found this year

https://www.karlsnotes.com/interesting-things-i-found-this-year/
1•valkrieco•3m ago•0 comments

A lifetime of ad-free documentaries without a recurring bill in this deal

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/offer/deals/a-lifetime-of-ad-free-documentaries-without-a-recurr...
2•WaitWaitWha•4m ago•1 comments

Calculus for the Modern Engineer

https://github.com/michiganrobotics/rob201
1•ArmageddonIt•5m ago•0 comments

The mongo db situation is crazy [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Wg6tiaar9M
1•kburman•5m ago•0 comments

The Ascendance of Algorithmic Tyranny

https://www.noemamag.com/the-ascendance-of-algorithmic-tyranny/
3•nanmu42•6m ago•0 comments

All my Deutschlandtickets gone: Fraud at an industrial scale [video]

https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-all-my-deutschlandtickets-gone-fraud-at-an-industrial-scale
1•Kyro38•7m ago•0 comments

Your brain doesn't suddenly 'fully develop' at 25 – what the neuroscience shows

https://theconversation.com/no-your-brain-doesnt-suddenly-fully-develop-at-25-heres-what-the-neur...
2•bikenaga•9m ago•0 comments

Global Memory Shortage Crisis: Market Analysis

https://www.idc.com/resource-center/blog/global-memory-shortage-crisis-market-analysis-and-the-po...
1•naves•10m ago•0 comments

The Industrial Age Roots of General Education

https://psu.pb.unizin.org/generaleducationfortheinformationsociety/chapter/the-industrial-age-roo...
2•teleforce•10m ago•0 comments

He Was a Supreme Court Lawyer. Then His Double Life Caught Up with Him

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/28/magazine/thomas-goldstein-supreme-court-gambling.html
2•hodgesrm•10m ago•1 comments

Don't Drag-N-Drop, Let AI Write Workflow Code

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzkSC26fPPE
1•Edmond•13m ago•0 comments

IWD Development Hiatus

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-IWD-Development-Halts
1•khimaros•14m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Niceform – a simple Typeform alternative with flat pricing

https://www.niceform.io/en
1•officialvikram•14m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Resources and Tips for learning to play harmonica

1•tizzyapunkt•16m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Promode for Claude Code

https://github.com/mikekelly/promode
1•AffableSpatula•17m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Nederland Postcode API – validate Dutch addresses

https://nederlandpostcode.nl
1•tjardo•17m ago•0 comments

I Used AI to Prove the Riemann Hypothesis. Roast Me Like You Roasted Budden

https://www.academia.edu/145618833/The_Riemann_Hypothesis_via_Toroidal_Geometry_Caustic_Singulari...
1•kristintynski•19m ago•3 comments

Firefox's low-latency WebAssembly compiler

http://wingolog.org/archives/2020/03/25/firefoxs-low-latency-webassembly-compiler
1•fanf2•19m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What are you building during the holiday break?

1•linsomniac•22m ago•1 comments

The Mathematics of Tuning Systems

https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2025/12/26/the-mathematics-of-tuning-systems/
3•chmaynard•22m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Will AI-based 4K restoration of old content put Tubi TV out of business?

1•amichail•24m ago•0 comments

Local LLMs are how nerds now justify a big computer they don't need

https://world.hey.com/dhh/local-llms-are-how-nerds-now-justify-a-big-computer-they-don-t-need-af2...
3•janandonly•29m ago•2 comments

I removed 80% of my JavaScript and my product got better

https://clipnotebook.com/blog/removed-80-percent-javascript
5•puildupO•30m ago•3 comments

Show HN: Sapphire – A 12MB language with native UI and good performance

https://github.com/foxzyt/Sapphire
2•foxz•31m ago•0 comments

To Understand AI, Watch How It Evolves

https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-understand-ai-watch-how-it-evolves-20250924/
3•Brajeshwar•32m ago•1 comments

Michael Burry Bets He Isn't Too Early to Go Against the AI Juggernaut

https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/michael-burry-bets-he-isnt-too-early-to-go-against-the-ai-jugg...
3•megacorp•35m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Compare what your current rent gets you in other cities

https://rentcheckr.app/
1•Atallapr•37m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Neural Net Flies Navigate through a maze

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/4c5465b6-c384-4c9f-8a92-a4f840367ec2
1•logicallee•40m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

The Emacs Widget Toolkit

https://appetrosyan.github.io/posts/emacs-widget.html
48•signa11•7mo ago

Comments

spit2wind•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo ago
Somewhat off topic, but I love all the references to Led Zeppelin’s incredible song, Stairway to Heaven.
gudzpoz•7mo 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•7mo 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.

robobro•7mo ago
Why did you delete the page?
appetrosyan•7mo ago
Didn't. I migrated to `hugo` and it trims off the `.html` at the end. The permalink is the same.
matt-attack•7mo 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 ?

LargoLasskhyfv•7mo ago
PSA: Use The Lucid Toolkit https://irreal.org/blog/?p=12672

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

appetrosyan•7mo ago
That's the best thing to do for the moment.
robobro•7mo ago
404

Page Not Found

Sorry, this page does not exist.

You can head back to the homepage.

appetrosyan•7mo ago
Hi. I just migrated my blog to Hugo yesterday. The correct link is:

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