A Tour of the Acme Editor • Hacker News Board

Re: A Tour of the Acme Editor

#11

Post by mej10 » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 6:02 PM UTC

jff wrote: post #10

ibdknox wrote: post #9

Very neat. It seems to me the really interesting bit here is the ability to add execution meaning to arbitrary bits of text. Can anyone who uses Acme comment on whether or not that is primarily what gives Acme its power? Is there something else key to it that isn't shown cleanly in the video? Interestingly, I also see Light Table as an "Integrating" Development Environment - something that utilizes all the amazing to…

The window management is a huge win for me, if you'll pardon the unintentional pun. It's so much simpler and fluid than in Emacs or Vim, at least for me. I just kind of throw windows around and resize them with an ease and speed that I was never able to achieve on Emacs. For instance, when using Emacs I may have as many as 4 windows open at a time, frequently switching buffers around with the clumsy C-x b switching (…

Have you written up a summary of your experiences? I would love to see a comparison from an Emacs user that switched to Acme.

So many of the concepts just seem painful to me at first glance (What? I have to use the mouse for things?) but I am sure that there is some merit to them, given that some of the greats used it.

What OS do you use it on, and what is it like using the plumber with other (non-Plan 9) components of the system?

Re: A Tour of the Acme Editor

#12

Post by mej10 » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 6:09 PM UTC

ibdknox wrote: post #9

Very neat. It seems to me the really interesting bit here is the ability to add execution meaning to arbitrary bits of text. Can anyone who uses Acme comment on whether or not that is primarily what gives Acme its power? Is there something else key to it that isn't shown cleanly in the video? Interestingly, I also see Light Table as an "Integrating" Development Environment - something that utilizes all the amazing to…

I thought the executing arbitrary text was pretty awesome, but I would definitely love to see more examples and uses.

I was also thinking - how hard would it be to add this to Emacs? does it already exist?

Re: A Tour of the Acme Editor

#13

Post by agumonkey » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 6:16 PM UTC

mej10 wrote: post #12

ibdknox wrote: post #9

Very neat. It seems to me the really interesting bit here is the ability to add execution meaning to arbitrary bits of text. Can anyone who uses Acme comment on whether or not that is primarily what gives Acme its power? Is there something else key to it that isn't shown cleanly in the video? Interestingly, I also see Light Table as an "Integrating" Development Environment - something that utilizes all the amazing to…

I thought the executing arbitrary text was pretty awesome, but I would definitely love to see more examples and uses. I was also thinking - how hard would it be to add this to Emacs? does it already exist?

Some extensions like FFAP (file-find-at-point) lookup the word at point in the filesystem, some leverage font and mouse infrastructure to turn text into action.

10$ it's quite easy to do, a generalized *-at-point, the "challenge" is to make it as configurable.

Re: A Tour of the Acme Editor

#14

Post by thebigshane » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 6:17 PM UTC

jff wrote: post #10

ibdknox wrote: post #9

Very neat. It seems to me the really interesting bit here is the ability to add execution meaning to arbitrary bits of text. Can anyone who uses Acme comment on whether or not that is primarily what gives Acme its power? Is there something else key to it that isn't shown cleanly in the video? Interestingly, I also see Light Table as an "Integrating" Development Environment - something that utilizes all the amazing to…

The window management is a huge win for me, if you'll pardon the unintentional pun. It's so much simpler and fluid than in Emacs or Vim, at least for me. I just kind of throw windows around and resize them with an ease and speed that I was never able to achieve on Emacs. For instance, when using Emacs I may have as many as 4 windows open at a time, frequently switching buffers around with the clumsy C-x b switching (…

(I have used both Acme and Emacs but only a little bit each) I can believe that most of the time it is easier to switch to the mouse to move the cursor where you want if it is no where near your current position. But what about just moving up and down one or two lines? Do you really just use Ctrl-A twice to go up a line? Or do you use the mouse? Or is there some alternative that I haven't heard yet?

http://acme.cat-v.org/keyboard

(oh and I really miss moving back and forth by word and incremental search with keyboard, I have nothing against using mouse for other things though)

Re: A Tour of the Acme Editor

#15

Post by agumonkey » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 6:20 PM UTC

jff wrote: post #10

ibdknox wrote: post #9

Very neat. It seems to me the really interesting bit here is the ability to add execution meaning to arbitrary bits of text. Can anyone who uses Acme comment on whether or not that is primarily what gives Acme its power? Is there something else key to it that isn't shown cleanly in the video? Interestingly, I also see Light Table as an "Integrating" Development Environment - something that utilizes all the amazing to…

The window management is a huge win for me, if you'll pardon the unintentional pun. It's so much simpler and fluid than in Emacs or Vim, at least for me. I just kind of throw windows around and resize them with an ease and speed that I was never able to achieve on Emacs. For instance, when using Emacs I may have as many as 4 windows open at a time, frequently switching buffers around with the clumsy C-x b switching (…

Emacs buffers ergonomy is quite low. I found some elisp to transpose buffers layout (pretty awesome). Some maximize / shadow code would be handy. It would be great to have one layout lib included in standard distro.

Re: A Tour of the Acme Editor

#16

Post by gruseom » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 6:32 PM UTC

Acme focuses entirely on the idea of text as user interface

Sounds a little like Oberon. I wonder how many people have used both.

Re: A Tour of the Acme Editor

#17

Post by EdiX » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 6:35 PM UTC

ibdknox wrote: post #9

Very neat. It seems to me the really interesting bit here is the ability to add execution meaning to arbitrary bits of text. Can anyone who uses Acme comment on whether or not that is primarily what gives Acme its power? Is there something else key to it that isn't shown cleanly in the video? Interestingly, I also see Light Table as an "Integrating" Development Environment - something that utilizes all the amazing to…

It's definitely the ability to parse expressions like ":" and open files at the right position, it essentially makes it integrated with many many unix tools without actually having to write any integration code.

The ease of piping the selection through an external program is a close second.

However I do not use it.

What's funny about acme is that it's a perfect metaphor for the entire plan9: it shows you how striving for a simple, beautiful design can create new, great solutions to old problems.

But at the same time it will also kill the adoption of the product completely: acme doesn't support any keybindings (doesn't fit the desing), no syntax highlighting (not the editor's job to parse code), nothing but bitmapped fonts (implementing externally defined standards is a chore), tags file support (doesn't fit the design), incremental search (doesn't fit the design), horizontal scrolling (makes it complicated to use the same editor control for the tags too), configuring the color scheme (no), weird non-standard behaviour of up and down keys (we just like it better this way)...

Bringing any of this up to a 9fan will also be a great metaphor for the friendliness of the community.

Re: A Tour of the Acme Editor

#18

Post by Ygg2 » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 6:48 PM UTC

sprash wrote: post #6

I really tried to use it but the disrupted work flow caused by the necessity for pixel perfect mouse aiming was headache inducing.

How can this be? In the example he managed to click on things to run commands by just clicking on the word, instead of selecting the entire line perfectly.

Re: A Tour of the Acme Editor

#19

Post by fallenapple » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 6:56 PM UTC

Can acme run without a graphics layer (e.g. X11) beyond VGA?

Why does it need more than VGA text if it entirely text-based?

Re: A Tour of the Acme Editor

#20

Post by luriel » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 7:01 PM UTC

gruseom wrote: post #16

Acme focuses entirely on the idea of text as user interface Sounds a little like Oberon. I wonder how many people have used both.

If you read the acme[1] paper you will see Rob Pike explicitly acknowledges the influence of Oberon.

This can be seen even more clearly in Acme's more direrect predecessor: help[2]

[1]: http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/acme/

[2]: http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/1st_edition/help/