Post by @zzt@mas.to

I’ve been wishing for years that emacs had a library for creating dired-style UIs

it does but there’s no way to know it unless you’re elisp manual spelunking because:

- the fucking thing is named ewoc
- dired doesn’t use it because it’s ancient code
- the elisp manual section is named Abstract Display, whatever the fuck that means
- the elisp manual waffles on about MVC instead of telling you straight up “this is how you make a dired-style editor for non-text structures without hating life”
- nobody seems to talk about ewoc ever

8 Replies

3 Boosts

d@nny disc@

@hipsterelectron@circumstances.run 37 min. ago

@zzt jonas bernoulli does a ton of incredible work on UI libraries. only name in the game imho and i mean that globally across any text editor

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@zzt@mas.to 33 min. ago

@hipsterelectron oh magit is fucking fantastic. I was going to mention it upthread but I was worried people would think it’s a poor example of the form since it’s not exactly a dired in structure but it’s very much in the same spirit

d@nny disc@

@hipsterelectron@circumstances.run 13 min. ago

@zzt transient is super fucking well done and he seems to be quite thoughtful about crafting high-quality expert interfaces for experts. it's sooo nice being catere s 2

emenel

@emenel@post.lurk.org 31 min. ago

@zzt @hipsterelectron yeah, magit is awesome. i also quite like dirvish.

d@nny disc@

@hipsterelectron@circumstances.run 37 min. ago

@zzt literally never heard of ewoc

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@zzt@mas.to 35 min. ago

@hipsterelectron https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Abstract-Display.html this is theoretically everything I wanted the last time I did a dired style app but I am suspicious

now I don’t have to juggle markers and text properties though!

View

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@zzt@mas.to 44 min. ago

dired style applications are fucking fantastic because you can use your editor to very naturally do a wide range of complicated directory and file operations

it’s an ls -l listing you can navigate and modify with editor commands (including editing the listing as text in one mode) and have it reflected on your file system

that’s powerful as hell and we need to have more of it, for everything

you should have dired for your drives, your monitors, your processes

why the hell not

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@zzt@mas.to 43 min. ago

anyway I guess I’m seeing if ewoc sucks later and if it does I’m doing the DSL for emacs UIs