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OpenRockets Foundation Released Magazine V2

https://mag.openrockets.com
2•openrockets•54s ago•0 comments

SOM: A minimal Smalltalk for teaching of and research on Virtual Machines

http://som-st.github.io/
1•tosh•1m ago•0 comments

The Big Bang: A.I. Has Created a Code Overload

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/technology/ai-code-overload.html
1•donohoe•1m ago•0 comments

Zooming UIs in 2026: Prezi, impress.js, and why I built something different

1•tinchox6•2m ago•0 comments

Why some cities are shutting down Flock cameras amid privacy concerns

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/apr/06/flock-cameras-privacy-concerns
3•devonnull•4m ago•0 comments

Tell HN: Reddit Seems to Be Down

4•forlorn•5m ago•3 comments

The Edwardian builder who had changed how we keep time

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd9vxg95ze2o
1•speckx•6m ago•0 comments

Scientists identify 'neural fingerprint' of psychedelic drugs in the brain

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/apr/06/scientists-identify-neural-fingerprint-of-psyched...
2•tmnvix•6m ago•0 comments

Refactoring Untested Code

https://yusufaytas.com/refactoring-untested-code/
5•kakerane•6m ago•0 comments

Open AI to give up to $100k and up to $1M in API credits

https://openai.com/index/industrial-policy-for-the-intelligence-age/
4•ageofattention•11m ago•0 comments

Poolside hunts data centre partners after CoreWeave deal falls through

https://www.ft.com/content/24168508-e2a1-447d-b1a0-44a0be0c0550
1•MasterScrat•11m ago•1 comments

Building an AI Companion with Perfect Memory

https://cortexdb.ai/blog/building-ai-companion
1•prmalik•12m ago•0 comments

Dupes vs. Originals: CT Scans Reveal What's Inside

https://www.lumafield.com/scan-of-the-month/dupes
2•viasfo•13m ago•1 comments

Some Contemporary Heresies

https://kevinkelly.substack.com/p/some-contemporary-heresies
1•jger15•15m ago•0 comments

Isaac Asimov on 1984

https://redsails.org/asimov-on-1984/
1•cybersoyuz•15m ago•0 comments

Netflix launches new gaming app for kids called Netflix Playground

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2026-04-06/netflix-playground-expands-f...
1•andsoitis•17m ago•0 comments

Pacific West (Reno, NV or Remote) – Systems / Software Architect (Exploratory)

https://pacificwestcompanies.com/
1•philhow•18m ago•1 comments

No on-site doctor: Dental student died in ICU overseen by remote tele-health MD

https://lawandcrime.com/lawsuit/no-on-site-doctor-dental-student-died-in-icu-overseen-by-remote-t...
4•randycupertino•22m ago•1 comments

A local LAN radio station that gives you ambient audio awareness of your agents

https://radioagent.live/
1•nmelo•22m ago•0 comments

Londoners are sick of viral videos telling lies about their city

https://www.londoncentric.media/p/london-crime-viral-videos-crime
2•pseudolus•23m ago•0 comments

The Cult of Vibe Coding Is Insane

https://bramcohen.com/p/the-cult-of-vibe-coding-is-insane
27•drob518•24m ago•3 comments

A visual guide to Iran's coastline and strategic islands

https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2026/iran-coastline-islands/
1•atlasunshrugged•25m ago•1 comments

Jaguar: We Will Be 'Exclusively Electric'

https://www.motor1.com/news/792058/jaguar-rawdon-glover-interview/
2•randycupertino•25m ago•0 comments

China stands to benefit most from the war-driven energy crisis

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/04/06/iran-war-china-renewable-energy/
2•CamelCaseCondo•25m ago•1 comments

Agent Retro: post-session retrospectives for coding agents

https://github.com/giannimassi/agent-retro
2•tidymince•26m ago•0 comments

Orca – moving beyond prompt-based agents

https://github.com/gfernandf/agent-skills
1•gfernandf1•27m ago•0 comments

Bored of Scrolling ChatGPT and Gemini

https://www.trydraft.app/
1•0xNishchit•27m ago•0 comments

AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

https://www.danvk.org/2026/03/08/oldnyc-updates.html
3•evakhoury•30m ago•0 comments

The Sales Learning Curve (2006)

https://hbr.org/2006/07/the-sales-learning-curve
1•wslh•33m ago•0 comments

Suno is a music copyright nightmare

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/906896/sunos-copyright-ai-music-covers
1•cdrnsf•33m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

The Emacs Widget Toolkit

https://appetrosyan.github.io/posts/emacs-widget.html
48•signa11•11mo ago

Comments

spit2wind•11mo 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•10mo 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•11mo ago
Somewhat off topic, but I love all the references to Led Zeppelin’s incredible song, Stairway to Heaven.
gudzpoz•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo ago
Why did you delete the page?
appetrosyan•10mo ago
Didn't. I migrated to `hugo` and it trims off the `.html` at the end. The permalink is the same.
matt-attack•10mo 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•10mo ago
PSA: Use The Lucid Toolkit https://irreal.org/blog/?p=12672

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

appetrosyan•10mo ago
That's the best thing to do for the moment.
robobro•10mo ago
404

Page Not Found

Sorry, this page does not exist.

You can head back to the homepage.

appetrosyan•10mo ago
Hi. I just migrated my blog to Hugo yesterday. The correct link is:

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