Personally, and contrary to the article, I <i>do</i> prefer Emacs's plain text widgets over more "GUI-like" ones. Plain text widgets minimize the differences between TUI and GUI Emacs and also inherently offer text selection, searching, copying, and pasting, which nicely integrates with Emacs. I mean, not many GUI frameworks let you place a cursor within a button and select its text, do they? I believe this is a unique advantage of text-based widgets: while other GUI applications require a dedicated mechanism for searching through their settings, text-based widgets allow you to use any text-searching packages to perform these actions.<p>Reading through the article, the author seems to be hoping for a pure GUI approach with Emacs-like navigation mechanisms, but I am not convinced that this can be as flexible as text-based widgets. However, for packages used exclusively within a GUI environment (like el-easydraw [1], which relies quite heavily on SVG-based widgets), it would be nice to have a dedicated GUI widget library.<p>(There was a discussion on Reddit about this a week ago [2], and I saw some comments defending GTK and PGTK that might be worth reading.)<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/misohena/el-easydraw/">https://github.com/misohena/el-easydraw/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1kcgwme/the_emacs_widget_toolkit/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1kcgwme/the_emacs_wi...</a>