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First, Make Me Care

https://gwern.net/blog/2026/make-me-care
1•andsoitis•1m ago•0 comments

National poll: Less than half of parents say swearing is never OK for kids

https://www.michiganmedicine.org/health-lab/less-half-parents-say-swearing-never-ok-kids
1•PaulHoule•3m ago•0 comments

Frozen Insight in a Moving World

https://jdu.github.io/2026-01-25-frozen-insights-in-a-moving-world.html
1•todsacerdoti•3m ago•0 comments

Strategies and lessons from partitioning a 17TB table in PostgreSQL

https://www.tines.com/blog/futureproofing-tines-partitioning-a-17tb-table-in-postgresql/
1•shayonj•4m ago•0 comments

List of Engineering Blunders

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_engineering_blunders
3•erhuve•4m ago•0 comments

The API Authorization Hierarchy of Needs: Why You Aren't Ready for AI Agents

https://auth0.com/blog/api-authorization-hierarchy-needs/
1•aaguiarz•6m ago•0 comments

Show HN: HyprKCS – A fast, native GTK4/Adwaita keybind manager for Hyprland

https://github.com/kosa12/hyprKCS
1•kosa12•7m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Decompile and deminify Bun using an LLM

https://www.npmjs.com/package/@shepherdjerred/bun-decompile
1•shepherdjerred•8m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Fdir – find and organize anything on your system

https://github.com/VG-dev1/fdir
1•Orbyss_Studio•8m ago•0 comments

Forza's Game Studio Rejects No-AI Clause, French VA Localization Canceled

https://twitter.com/MathieuTouquet/status/2015425148237533311
1•WhereIsTheTruth•8m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Uv-pack – Pack a uv environment for later portable (offline) install

https://github.com/davnn/uv-pack
1•davnn•9m ago•0 comments

Animals Build a Sense of Direction

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-animals-build-a-sense-of-direction-20260121/
1•tzury•9m ago•0 comments

ACM Conference on Reproducibility and Replicability

https://acmrep.github.io
2•jruohonen•9m ago•1 comments

Generative AI is not trained on "data"

https://deniz.aksimsek.tr/2026/training-data/
1•speckx•9m ago•0 comments

PkgFed: ActivityPub for Package Releases

https://nesbitt.io/2026/01/25/pkgfed-activitypub-for-package-releases.html
2•8organicbits•10m ago•0 comments

Why Building AI Agents Is Mostly a Waste of Time

https://medium.com/data-science-collective/why-building-ai-agents-is-mostly-a-waste-of-time-55600...
3•onurkanbkrc•13m ago•1 comments

Imposter Syndrome Predicts Perfectionism

https://www.psypost.org/imposter-syndrome-is-strongly-linked-to-these-two-types-of-perfectionism/
2•mustaphah•14m ago•0 comments

Cursor AI Hackathon Idea: AI/FOSS ERP, Tax and Legal Infrastructure

https://blog.hermesloom.org/p/hackathon-idea-global-ai-and-foss
1•sigalor•16m ago•0 comments

Agent is building things you'll never use

https://mahdiyusuf.com/your-agent-is-building-things-youll-never-use/
1•birdculture•17m ago•0 comments

New York Startup Builds Fridge-Sized Machine That Can Turn Air into Gasoline

https://www.jalopnik.com/2083556/new-york-startup-builds-machine-that-makes-gasoline-from-air/
1•fcpguru•17m ago•0 comments

Oracles AI datacenters buildout needs $500B Wall Street is flinching

https://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-openai-stargate-loans-jpmorgan-diminishing-interest-debt-2...
1•zerosizedweasle•19m ago•1 comments

Brazilian Vercel (Now in Beta)

https://trapiche.cloud
1•acfilho•21m ago•0 comments

The Strange Brain of the World’s Greatest Solo Climber

https://nautil.us/the-strange-brain-of-the-worlds-greatest-solo-climber-236051/
1•thm•22m ago•0 comments

I added an epistemology layer to a coding agent. It got cleaner, but dumber

https://leanpub.com/system3-fluent-autonomy
1•hanialshater•23m ago•1 comments

What if there was a free tool to generate a music playlist for your next flight?

https://www.hypemyflight.com
1•codexhaus•24m ago•0 comments

CorsProxy

https://corsproxy.io/
2•kaycebasques•25m ago•1 comments

The Retail Coffee Revolution: Why Brands Like LV and Coach Are Opening Cafes

https://kpimacrr.gensparkspace.com/
2•rohitS18•26m ago•0 comments

Freedium: Paywall Breakthrough for Medium

https://github.com/Freedium-cfd
2•thunderbong•27m ago•0 comments

Sam Altman's make-or-break year: can OpenAI CEO cash in his bet on the future?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2026/jan/25/sam-altman-openai
4•billybuckwheat•29m ago•1 comments

Winning the Wrong Game

https://tante.cc/2026/01/25/winning-the-wrong-game/
1•doener•29m 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/