Comment by d12frosted

Thanks for the detailed response! This is really helpful feedback.

Looking at your gist, I think the code actually illustrates why I built vui.el in the first place. The schema→widget mapping logic is genuinely interesting work, but a significant chunk of the code (~400 lines) is dedicated to the inline form lifecycle: jsf--inline-forms registry, marker tracking, resync passes, advice on widget-before-change, overlay cleanup, etc. That's exactly the plumbing vui.el handles automatically.

With vui.el, your json-schema-form could potentially be just the schema translation + a component wrapper:

    (vui-defcomponent json-schema-form (schema on-submit)
      :state ((values (schema-defaults schema))
              (errors nil))
      :render
      (vui-vstack
       (render-schema-fields schema values
         :on-change (lambda (path val)
                      (vui-set-state :values (set-at-path values path val))))
       (vui-button "Submit"
         :on-click (lambda ()
                     (let ((errs (validate-schema schema values)))
                       (if errs
                           (vui-set-state :errors errs)
                         (funcall on-submit values)))))))

State tracking, cleanup on close, multiple forms per buffer - all handled by the framework. Your validation logic and schema mapping would be the same, just without the infrastructure code.

On the emacs -q -nw workflow: it works, but you might find eldev + buttercup tests even better for AI-assisted iteration. The agent can run eldev test after changes and self-correct on failures. Byte-compilation catches issues too. Claude Code handles eldev well out of the box.

Anyway, not trying to hard-sell vui.el - your approach clearly works and the schema-form idea is cool. But if you do hit more state/cleanup headaches, might be worth a look. Happy to help if you want to try porting the schema logic over.