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The Emacs Widget Library: A Critique and Case Study

106 points by whacked_new

by nesarkvechnep

1 subcomments

Argh, a few screenshots would’ve been nice. There’s none to be found in vui.el’s repository.

by rahen

2 subcomments

For those interested, this guy is revamping the Emacs widget library with something more modern and platform agnostic, based on SDL: https://appetrosyan.github.io/posts/
His posts are very insightful.

by whacked_new

1 subcomments

I'm happy more people are interested in this critique! And thanks for d12frosted for joining the discussion.
I was searching for what's the latest in emacs widgets developments because I was interested in using widgets. Emacs Customize for example, renders text-based widgets in an editable buffer, which is very uncommon nowadays. Emacs seems like the best candidate for this kind of interactivity. I'm sure it's possible in other editors, but with significantly more effort and significantly slower rendering. I also considered lem, but the barrier also seems much higher.
His post also led me to his vui.el project, but I ended up not trying it, since after understanding the tradeoffs, I pushed the widget code creation to an LLM. I still get frequent unbalanced parentheses errors so I still stay close to the defaults.
The PoC is about testing a method to render a widgets-based, json-schema-validated input form that you can embed dynamically into an emacs buffer, enter the data, then do something post-validation. If anyone's interested, here's the latest state of the LLM-generated and human-fixed code: https://gist.github.com/whacked/6875c5117b48528e619755e13e24...

by dinkleberg

3 subcomments

by volemo

0 subcomment

Oh, that's the guy who does `homebrew-emacs-plue` --- my preferred distribution of Emacs!

by frou_dh

1 subcomments

When drawing outlines, tables, etc, I hope the new approach (vui) uses real Unicode box-drawing characters and not - | + etc. It's high time TUI people raise their standards a bit and consider unbroken line drawing (no gaps between repeated characters) a requirement rather than a luxury!

by geokon

1 subcomments

I only have a limited experience with GUI Widgets - by using JavaFX through `cljfx`
- vui.el seems like the right idea - You have a widget library, and then you add state management, you add layout management etc. It's sort of a blessing widget is simple enough to be reused this way
- ECS and inheritance. I have personally never really hit on this limitation. It's there in the abstract.. but don't GUIs generally fit the OO paradigm pretty well? Looking at the class tree for JavaFX, I don't see any really awkward widgets that are ambiguously placed.
- State Management. This can be bolted on - like with vui.el. But to me this feels like something that should be independent of GUIs. Something like Pathom looks more appealing to me here
- "Not a full reactive framework - Emacs doesn't need that complexity" .. why not? Maybe the library internals are complex, but it makes user code much simpler, no?

by pjmlp

0 subcomment

A blog post about widgets with zero screenshots, kind of tells where priorities lie.

by smitty1e

0 subcomment

by rurban

0 subcomment

by 0x1ceb00da

6 subcomments

> The buffer is the UI, rendered by Emacs's extremely optimised text display machinery
Doesn't emacs lag like crazy in files with large lines. Why is this still a problem? Every modern editor handles this gracefully. I remember reading something about using regexes for syntax highlighting. This looks like a problem in the rendering layer which shouldn't be too hard to fix without touching the core engine. Are there any other problems that make it difficult to fix without disabling any useful features?