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A Tour of the Acme Editor

research.swtch.com

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Re: A Tour of the Acme Editor

#31

Post by jff »

mej10 wrote: post #11
jff wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I haven't written up a big summary, just occasional posts like this on HN and elsewhere. I started life as an Emacs user, switched to Vim, flip-flopped between the two for various tasks. The whole time, in the background, I was playing with Plan 9 and Acme; eventually I got sufficiently addicted to Acme that I dropped Emacs and Vim for most of my editing. I still use Emacs as a mail reader (and nothing else), Vim for quick edits or working on a remote system, and Acme for everything else.

I don't actually take the Plan9Ports thing as far as I could (I work on Linux, mostly, often with a drawterm connection open to our Plan 9 server). I run a plumber, and Acme, but I don't run rio (the window manager) or 9term (the xterm replacement), which means I'm going to miss out on some of the plumbing stuff. Mostly I just run the plumber so I can say "B " at a shell to have it pop up in my Acme.

Re: A Tour of the Acme Editor

#32

Post by jff »

thebigshane wrote: post #14
jff wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As you say, there are great use cases for just having a simple keyboard shortcut. Ron Minnich made "smacme", a modified acme with the basic Emacs C-f, C-b, C-n, C-p bindings in; you can find it in the sources directory IIRC, but in any case it's really a pretty simple hack.

Re: A Tour of the Acme Editor

#33

Post by bbbertie »

It would be really neat to integrate the plumber into one's usual development environment, be it vim or emacs or whatever. I'd like to do this with vim, but I thought I'd ask first: Does anyone here already do this (with plan 9 from user space)? Any hang-ups I should be prepared for?

Re: A Tour of the Acme Editor

#34

Post by srik »

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.

From the comments -

Rob Pike (about 2 hours ago) : What Russ doesn't stress enough is the major thing Acme brought, beyond what it borrowed from Oberon etc.: the contextual right click. One button click gets what I want, be it the next appearance of a word, the line the compiler's complaining about, a man page, a PDF file, a UPS delivery notice, whatever. If the data's here, jump the mouse to the location (another thing Russ didn't point out) and highlight it. If it's not there, load it and jump to it.

One click, context-driven. It's hard to appreciate how powerful and effective that is without trying it.

Re: A Tour of the Acme Editor

#35

Post by jff »

rsc wrote: post #26
fallenapple wrote: post #19

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?

> Can acme run without a graphics layer (e.g. X11) beyond VGA? It would not be hard to make the underlying graphics code work on top of linuxfb. I think a patch for that might be floating around. > Why does it need more than VGA text if it entirely text-based? Did you really watch the video? You can see that while acme is entirely about editing text, the UI itself is graphical.

Russ, you probably remember that Aki did a linuxfb version of drawterm for Tiny Horrible Xen; I'd bet the changes could be adapted to Plan 9 Port without too much trouble, really the Linux framebuffer is pretty simple.

Re: A Tour of the Acme Editor

#36

Post by pdw »

Conceptually I love Acme, but the three-button mouse thing has turned out to be a real problem for me. I don't think I can work without a scroll mouse, and I've never found a mouse that has both three real buttons and a scroll wheel. Can anybody recommend one?

Re: A Tour of the Acme Editor

#37

Post by awood »

pdw wrote: post #36

Conceptually I love Acme, but the three-button mouse thing has turned out to be a real problem for me. I don't think I can work without a scroll mouse, and I've never found a mouse that has both three real buttons and a scroll wheel. Can anybody recommend one?

The scroll wheel can be clicked as a middle mouse button on most mice.

Re: A Tour of the Acme Editor

#39

Post by jff »

sgt wrote: post #23

From the looks of it, everyone on HN is currently downloading Plan 9 from User Space. It's a 51MB download and the download speed is currently 3-4kB/sec!

Quoth Russ Cox:

The swtch.com machine has a fairly slow connection. Better ways to get it: - hg clone https://code.google.com/p/plan9port plan9 - http://am.lcs.mit.edu/~rsc/plan9port.tgz I changed the link on the home page to point to that tgz instead.

Re: A Tour of the Acme Editor

#40

Post by pdw »

awood wrote: post #37
pdw wrote: post #36

Conceptually I love Acme, but the three-button mouse thing has turned out to be a real problem for me. I don't think I can work without a scroll mouse, and I've never found a mouse that has both three real buttons and a scroll wheel. Can anybody recommend one?

The scroll wheel can be clicked as a middle mouse button on most mice.

That's true, but it's very awkward. In Acme, the middle button means 'execute command'. You need to press it constantly, often in combination with other buttons. A clickable scroll wheel is not good enough.
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