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Sam Altman Hires Dylan Scandinaro as Head of Preparedness

https://twitter.com/sama/status/2018800541716107477
1•marwann•39s ago•0 comments

SpaceX Acquires xAI in $1.25T All-Stock Deal

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/02/elon-musk-spacex-xai-ipo.html
1•m463•54s ago•0 comments

Show HN: Security platform for vibe coded apps

https://twitter.com/ananayarora/status/2018783794166419537
1•chaitanyya•54s ago•0 comments

Package Management Made Easy

http://pixi.prefix.dev/v0.63.2/
1•lwhsiao•1m ago•0 comments

Why the World Must Measure Well-Being, Not GDP

https://worldsensorium.com/why-the-world-must-measure-well-being-not-gdp/
1•dnetesn•2m ago•0 comments

What Would Richard Feynman Make of AI Today?

https://nautil.us/what-would-richard-feynman-make-of-ai-today-1262875/
1•dnetesn•3m ago•0 comments

Mesh: A compacting memory allocator for C/C++

https://github.com/plasma-umass/Mesh
1•fanf2•3m ago•0 comments

The case for optimism in South Africa

https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2026/01/27/the-case-for-optimism-in-south-africa
1•paulpauper•5m ago•0 comments

Effects of Acute Exercise and Meditation on Cognitive Function (2018)

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6025452/
1•wslh•5m ago•0 comments

Next-gen nuclear reactors safe enough to skip full environmental reviews

https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/03/nextgen_nuclear_reactors_skip_nepa_reviews/
1•Bender•7m ago•1 comments

A skill for agents to work with the JJ VCS

https://github.com/danverbraganza/jujutsu-skill
2•nvader•7m ago•0 comments

Show HN: DevSweep – A TDD-backed CLI to clean artifacts safely

https://github.com/Sstark97/dev_sweep
1•ascinfo•7m ago•0 comments

DIY AI bot farm OpenClaw is a security 'dumpster fire'

https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/03/openclaw_security_problems/
2•Bender•8m ago•0 comments

Chrome rolling out WebGPU for Linux, starting with support for Intel Gen12 GPUs

https://issues.chromium.org/issues/442791440
1•simonpure•9m ago•0 comments

Chemical Valley: A Toxic Tale [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifxPjKZTgk0
1•marysminefnuf•11m ago•0 comments

SBA cuts off non-US citizens from primary loan program

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/03/sba-non-us-citizens-primary-loan-program-00762363
3•propter_hoc•12m ago•1 comments

What Is the Save Act? Voter ID Law Explained

https://allaboutlawyer.com/what-is-the-save-act-voter-id-law-explained/
1•embedding-shape•13m ago•0 comments

When magic meets multicore: OCaml and its elegant era of parallelism [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JmtVtREAco
1•matt_d•14m ago•0 comments

The OpenClaw Security Problem

https://www.osohq.com/post/the-clawbot-moltbot-openclaw-problem
3•meghan•15m ago•0 comments

Age verification doesn't need to suck

https://willhackett.uk/age-verification-digital-id/
2•whh•16m ago•0 comments

The Game That Ate Itself

https://www.seeingthesystem.com/p/the-game-that-ate-itself
1•TinyBig•17m ago•1 comments

Runedle – Wordle for Old School RuneScape

https://runedle.com/
2•vladde•18m ago•1 comments

Mcpblox: CLI for transforming and composing MCP servers

https://github.com/vivekhaldar/mcpblox
1•gandalfgeek•18m ago•0 comments

Aging clock reveals molecules that protect against neurodegeneration

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-02-neurons-age-early-aging-clock.html
1•bikenaga•20m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Reg.run - Decoupling AI "thinking" from API execution

1•regrun•20m ago•0 comments

Reworked NTFS Linux Driver Posted with More Improvements and Fixes

https://www.phoronix.com/news/NTFS-Remake-Linux-v6
1•Bender•21m ago•0 comments

Show HN: ACF – Local AI code generation pipeline with marketplace extensions

https://github.com/Tennisee-data/acf
1•zen4ttitude•22m ago•1 comments

What Prediction Feels Like: From Thermodynamics to Mind

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/02/what-prediction-feels-like-from-thermodynamics-to-m...
1•foxworthwya•25m ago•0 comments

Even as a fast dev, I wasn't fast enough for my ideas. Then came Vibe Coding

1•derverstand•25m ago•1 comments

Microsoft Campus Library Closes

https://www.geekwire.com/2026/microsoft-campus-library-closes-in-broader-shift-to-ai-powered-digi...
3•ohjeez•26m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

The Emacs Widget Toolkit

https://appetrosyan.github.io/posts/emacs-widget.html
48•signa11•8mo ago

Comments

spit2wind•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
Somewhat off topic, but I love all the references to Led Zeppelin’s incredible song, Stairway to Heaven.
gudzpoz•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
Why did you delete the page?
appetrosyan•8mo ago
Didn't. I migrated to `hugo` and it trims off the `.html` at the end. The permalink is the same.
matt-attack•8mo 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•8mo ago
PSA: Use The Lucid Toolkit https://irreal.org/blog/?p=12672

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

appetrosyan•8mo ago
That's the best thing to do for the moment.
robobro•8mo ago
404

Page Not Found

Sorry, this page does not exist.

You can head back to the homepage.

appetrosyan•8mo ago
Hi. I just migrated my blog to Hugo yesterday. The correct link is:

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