The Emacs Widget Library: A Critique and Case Study

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?

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dinkleberg 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This site is quite illegible if your system is set to prefers dark theme.

	▲	mandw 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes, copied it in to my scratch buffer to read it, not readable in the browser at all with a dark background. It did then make all the elisp nice to look at.
	▲	aaronchall 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I clicked through hoping you were wrong, saw the first page, and thought, ah, this is legible... then I got to the code blocks and was completely blinded. I'm not sure what to tell authors of such pages...

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volemo an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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rurban 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

vui.el, nice!

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smitty1e 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Thank whoever for posting this.

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0x1ceb00da an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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?

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xenophonf an hour ago | parent [-]

https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/598/how-do-i-preve... has some answers (and solutions).

	▲	0x1ceb00da an hour ago \| parent [-]
		So long mode is the best fix for this issue but it disables syntax highlighting and line numbers. Vscode can handle long lines just fine without disabling anything.