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Berlin offers free entry for litter picking to make tourists do their bit

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/04/16/berlin-offers-free-entry-for-litter-picking-to-make...
1•ohjeez•30s ago•0 comments

TSA Bans This Knife at Checkpoint – Then Airlines Hand It to You on Plane

https://viewfromthewing.com/tsa-bans-this-knife-at-the-checkpoint-then-airlines-hand-it-to-you-on...
1•bookofjoe•3m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Does magic link authentication use HTML canvansing?

1•trinsic2•6m ago•0 comments

SF is obsessed with the safest drivers and ignoring the ones killing people

https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/pedestrian-death-driver-accident-22210904.php
1•aranchelk•8m ago•0 comments

Write Code Like You Just Learned How to Program

https://prog21.dadgum.com/87.html
2•tosh•8m ago•1 comments

Salesforce launches Headless 360 turn platform in infrastructure for AI agents

https://venturebeat.com/ai/salesforce-launches-headless-360-to-turn-its-entire-platform-into-infr...
2•ulrischa•11m ago•0 comments

Bluetooth tracker in a postcard and mailed to a warship exposed its location

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/bluetooth-tracker-hidden-in-a-postcard-...
2•tcp_handshaker•11m ago•0 comments

Trump, When Asked About White House Meeting with Anthropic's Dario Amodei: Who?

https://gizmodo.com/trump-when-asked-about-white-house-meeting-with-anthropics-dario-amodei-who-2...
3•ulrischa•12m ago•0 comments

Too many tools or tool overload

https://devcyc.life/too-many-tools-or-tool-overload/
2•lilerjee•14m ago•0 comments

IMF says America's $39T national debt is a global problem

https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/world-going-broke-imf-says-194850050.html
3•tcp_handshaker•14m ago•0 comments

Shared Dictionaries: compression that keeps up with the agentic web

https://blog.cloudflare.com/shared-dictionaries/
3•Brajeshwar•17m ago•0 comments

Show HN: DOMPrompter – click a DOM element, get a structured AI coding prompt

3•witnote•19m ago•0 comments

List of people imprisoned for editing Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_imprisoned_for_editing_Wikipedia
5•lr0•19m ago•0 comments

Phantom Camerawork: Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999)

https://theasc.com/magazine/sept99/phantom/index.htm
1•exvi•20m ago•0 comments

SpaceX Files FCC Complaint over Ariane 64 Amazon Leo Launch

https://europeanspaceflight.com/spacex-files-fcc-complaint-over-ariane-64-amazon-leo-launch/
2•tcp_handshaker•22m ago•0 comments

The AI stack trap: the hidden cost of overbuilding with AI

https://www.forbes.com/sites/abdoriani/2026/01/24/the-ai-stack-trap-the-hidden-cost-of-overbuildi...
1•DrZootron•23m ago•0 comments

Welcome to the Machine: The Matrix (1999)

https://theasc.com/magazine/apr99/matrix/index.htm
2•exvi•23m ago•0 comments

4-bit floating point FP4

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2026/04/17/fp4/
2•chmaynard•26m ago•1 comments

Comparing GPT-5.4, Opus 4.6, GLM-5.1, Kimi K2.5, MiMo V2 Pro and MiniMax M2.7

https://www.codejam.info/2026/04/comparing-gpt-5-4-opus-4-6-glm-5-1-kimi-k2-5-mimo-v2-pro-and-min...
1•funkyval•29m ago•0 comments

Two $20B: OpenAI and Nvidia in a 'Reasoning Battle'

https://jianshiapp.com/two-20-billion-openai-and-nvidia-in-a-reasoning-battle/
1•ninjahawk1•31m ago•0 comments

Graphs That Explain the State of AI in 2026

https://spectrum.ieee.org/state-of-ai-index-2026
1•bryanrasmussen•34m ago•0 comments

Poetical: AI Poetry Feed

https://apps.apple.com/ro/app/poetical-ai-poetry-feed/id6761653704
1•mening12001•34m ago•0 comments

Unobtrusive inference of diurnal rhythms from smartphone data

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-025-02254-1
1•bryanrasmussen•35m ago•0 comments

Show HN: WebGL Liminal Space

https://liminal-dwsw5.ondigitalocean.app/
1•5fc3b4•36m ago•0 comments

Rail: A self-hosting language that speaks TLS alone

https://github.com/zemo-g/rail
2•zem0g•37m ago•0 comments

SDF Based Chess Rendering

https://github.com/Janos95/onion
1•janos95•43m ago•2 comments

Does Your Poop Float?

https://buildojas.substack.com/p/does-your-poop-float
2•rohan_shah•43m ago•1 comments

The quest to measure our relationship with nature

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/04/16/1135245/measure-relationship-with-nature-index/
1•joozio•44m ago•0 comments

An Agentic Home Bioreactor

https://chillphysicsenjoyer.substack.com/p/an-agentic-home-bioreactor
1•crescit_eundo•45m ago•0 comments

URLmind – Turn any business URL into structured context for AI agents

https://urlmind.com
2•urlmind•47m 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•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo ago
Why did you delete the page?
appetrosyan•11mo ago
Didn't. I migrated to `hugo` and it trims off the `.html` at the end. The permalink is the same.
matt-attack•11mo 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•11mo ago
PSA: Use The Lucid Toolkit https://irreal.org/blog/?p=12672

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

appetrosyan•11mo ago
That's the best thing to do for the moment.
robobro•11mo ago
404

Page Not Found

Sorry, this page does not exist.

You can head back to the homepage.

appetrosyan•11mo ago
Hi. I just migrated my blog to Hugo yesterday. The correct link is:

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