January 13, 2026
Lag, Love, and Dark Mode Meltdown
The Emacs Widget Library: A Critique and Case Study
Emacs UI deep-dive sparks love, lag rants, and dark mode meltdowns
TLDR: A developer dissects Emacs’s old widget toolkit and shows a working table with editable cells. Comments split between applause, dark-mode complaints, and a debate over Emacs’s lag and aging design—proof this quirky editor still stirs big feelings.
Emacs—yes, that famously hardcore text editor—just got a spicy reality check. A dev unpacked its decades-old widget library (the stuff that makes buttons, checkboxes, and text fields inside Emacs) and even built a table with editable cells to prove what works—and what breaks. The author loves the “everything is a buffer” philosophy and the speed of text-based UI, but admits it’s painful to combine behaviors and manage layout. Cue the comments: fans cheered, calling out the author’s distro cred (“homebrew-emacs-plue”) and tossing quick shoutouts like “vui.el, nice!” Meanwhile, accessibility hawks crashed the party with a dark-mode meltdown: “This site is quite illegible…” set the tone.
And the hottest fight? Performance. A line about “the buffer is the UI” triggered a familiar rant: why does Emacs still lag on giant lines when modern editors don’t? Some argued the design shows its age; others defended the purity of text-first UI. There was gratitude (“Thank whoever for posting this”), but the mood was equal parts admiration and exasperation. Folks relitigated old-school inheritance (widgets as “types”) versus modern plug-in components, translated into plain speak as “building with Lego vs. class family trees.” Meme of the day: Everything is a buffer became Everything is suffering, delivered with love. Verdict: the post lit up a niche topic and reminded everyone that Emacs drama never dies.
Key Points
- •Emacs’s widget library (widget.el, wid-edit.el) was created in 1996 by Per Abrahamsen to power the Customize interface and remains the basis for M-x customize.
- •Widgets in Emacs are text-based, living in buffers and using overlays and text properties, enabling consistent behavior across GUI and terminal Emacs.
- •The library’s inheritance-based type system allows creating new widget types from existing ones; example chains include bounded-int-field → int-field → field → default.
- •The article presents a case study of building a dynamic, editable table widget, with working code in a separate extension library (widget-extra).
- •Reported lessons include strong performance with many widgets, but challenges in combining orthogonal behaviors, state management, layout workarounds, and cursor position preservation.