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.
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.
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...