ETAF

ETAF is the text-application framework built above the independent Ebox layout and rendering engine.

The public model is intentionally small:

• View describes Hosts and Component calls.
• Component turns props into a View.
• Ebox measures, lays out, paints, and publishes the result.

Every structural form uses one shape:

(name :property value ... child ...)

Properties come first and children come last. Property values are ordinary Elisp expressions. expr is the only executable child bridge:

(etaf-view
 (column
  (text :face 'bold "Hello")
  (text (expr :value (if ready "Ready" "Waiting")))))

Define a stateless Component with :view:

(etaf-define-component status-label (&key label)
  "Render a status label."
  :view
  (text :face 'bold (expr :value label)))

(etaf-mount
 "*etaf-demo*"
 (etaf-view
  (status-label :label "Connected")))

etaf-view is the sole public View construction entry. View forms and Component :view forms do not use quote. Quote remains ordinary Elisp data syntax, for example 'bold as a face symbol. A Renderable returned by ordinary Elisp must be constructed with an unquoted (etaf-view ...) inside expr.

Development checkout

During development, load the sibling Ebox checkout before ETAF:

(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/github/emacs-box")
(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/github/etaf")
(require 'etaf)

The package metadata declares Ebox 1.0.1 as the runtime dependency. ETAF never calls Ebox private functions.

Scope of this first slice

The repository currently establishes and tests the P0 grammar, etaf-view, expr, stateless :view Components, core Hosts (text, fragment, container, row, column, stack, flex, and spacer), and the Ebox mount bridge. Stateful :setup, slots, styles, Context, Behaviors, events, actions, data, and incremental Component reconciliation are subsequent implementation milestones; unsupported clauses fail explicitly.

Run the focused checks with:

make check EMACS=/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs

The target architecture and the sequenced implementation work are documented in docs/architecture.en.md and docs/implementation-plan.en.md. Chinese versions are kept beside them.