frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You (2001)

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architecture-astronauts-scare-you/
1•kaeruct•53s ago•0 comments

Executable Scripts with Dependencies

https://alexn.org/blog/2026/09/17/executable-scripts-with-dependencies/
1•kaeruct•4m ago•0 comments

Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, Google sued over call to 'pace' AI development

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/18/anthropic-openai-spacexai-google-sued-over-calls-to-pace...
2•MarcScott•6m ago•0 comments

Jev Plays Manic Miner

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrTeW3XtYsQ
1•iamflimflam1•9m ago•1 comments

WinBoat's Helios VGPU: What It Is (and Isn't)

https://www.kstrlworks.com/blog/winboat-helios-vgpu-explained/
1•mashally•14m ago•0 comments

Genius Revisited Revisited

https://gwern.net/hunter
2•paulpauper•14m ago•0 comments

A graphical desktop for the ZX Spectrum

https://github.com/mindbox77/zxdesk
2•graemep•14m ago•0 comments

The Data-Center Debate Is Divorced from the Facts

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/09/data-center-facts-effects/688670/
1•paulpauper•14m ago•0 comments

So I have a weatherman, which also tells me the news

https://dexteroot.net/posts/2026/07/so-i-have-a-weatherman-which-also-tells-me-the-news-part-1/
1•picklerick12•14m ago•0 comments

Book Review: This Is Going to Hurt

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-this-is-going-to
1•paulpauper•15m ago•0 comments

Naomi Beckwith: »We're going to avoid every kind of violence«

https://www.zeit.de/feuilleton/kunst/2026-09/naomi-beckwith-documenta-16-artistic-director-protes...
1•Tomte•17m ago•0 comments

Kids Drawings Trends

https://walzr.com/kids-trends/
1•Kortaggio•17m ago•0 comments

Two Languages Ending in End: The Unexpected Kinship of Eiffel and Lua

https://www.eiffel.org/blog/Finnian%20Reilly/2026/09/two-languages-ending-end-unexpected-kinship-...
1•AstroJetson•18m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A terminal inbox for a GitHub repo PRs

https://github.com/OscBacon/tungsten
1•OscBacon•19m ago•0 comments

VS Code Liquid Glass Theme

https://alec.is/posts/macos-liquid-glass-and-vscode/
1•arm32•20m ago•0 comments

Show HN: We've built an AI UGC video creator,free for one month

https://kuvu.ai/marketing/ai-ugc
1•longyuanpro•20m ago•0 comments

What Zig felt like, coming from Rust

https://besok.github.io/posts/what-zig-felt-like-coming-from-rust/
4•ksec•21m ago•0 comments

The AI Model That Won't Talk to You: The Missing Piece for AI Workflows?

https://mlnotes.substack.com/p/the-ai-model-that-wont-talk-to-you
1•ma1ms•21m ago•0 comments

Tin: full-text search for Postgres

https://planetscale.com/blog/introducing-tin
3•ksec•24m ago•0 comments

WebKit Features for Safari 27.0

https://webkit.org/blog/18325/webkit-features-for-safari-27-0/
2•ksec•24m ago•0 comments

A 1938 television miracle: BBC television signals from across the Atlantic

https://www.kasterborous.co.uk/a-1938-television-miracle-bbc-television-signals-from-across-the-a...
1•austinallegro•28m ago•0 comments

From Academia to Alignment

https://millicosm.substack.com/p/from-academia-to-alignment
1•mhb•29m ago•0 comments

Most predictions I see are still way too conservative

https://twitter.com/thorstenball/status/2101305394190557466/photo/1
2•tosh•30m ago•0 comments

The computer science major is in trouble. At Berkeley, it's complicated

https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/2026-summer/major-issue/
2•PopAlongKid•31m ago•1 comments

The Life-and-Death Exhaustion of React

https://im.not.ci/what-a-react/
2•uneven9434•33m ago•0 comments

More Than a Gigabuck: Estimating GNU/Linux's Size (2001)

https://dwheeler.com/sloc/redhat71-v1/redhat71sloc.1.00.html
1•bilegeek•33m ago•0 comments

Show HN

https://superii.site/
1•aegiswizard•33m ago•2 comments

GPT–6 Astra breaking an Enigma message that has resisted solution since 2005

https://cryptocellar.org/bgac/the-mvueh-break.html
1•jcurbo•34m ago•0 comments

The Wrong Race: the US, China, and AI Competition [pdf]

https://quincyinst-2.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/17163452/QUINCY-BRIEF-NO.-110-SE...
1•hunglee2•35m ago•0 comments

The Empty Heading

https://www.chrbutler.com/the-empty-heading
4•delaugust•35m ago•0 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 ?