On 17/02/18 02:04 PM, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 17, 2018 at 7:42 AM, Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca> wrote:
>> Ok, that at least is good to know.  Now I have to figure out from your
>> example what a widget is, I've heard the term but so far I have no clue what
>> sort of critter they might be.
> A "widget" is just an arbitrary thing that you've built.  It's like
> using the word "foo" as a placeholder for an abstract value.  As far
> back as I remember, a "widget" was used in economics to refer to an
> unspecified object, such as a consumer good or a machine part, that
> was manufactured by a hypothetical factory or sold by a hypothetical
> wholesaler or retailer, but you can probably find earlier meanings
> with an etymology search.  When windowing UIs became a thing back in
> the 80s it got retconned into a portmanteau of "window gadget" and
> used to describe components of the desktop.  Zsh borrowed the term to
> refer to the chunk of programming, whether C or shell function, that
> implements a named and therefore bindable operation in the ZLE editor.
>
That doesn't sound too terrible, not some actualnew construction? So a 
function can be a widget? Show me one that I can understand and then 
I'll stop imagining that it's some new horror.  When would I call 
something a widget, not a function? When it's associated with ZLE?  
Yeah, that sounds about right.