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A Tour of the Acme Editor

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Re: A Tour of the Acme Editor

#61

Post by rsc »

fallenapple wrote: post #28
rsc wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not only have I watched the video, I've used acme. VGA text is everywhere. No need to switch to Linux (and patch it), switch to OSX, use hardware than runs Plan 9, or any other restrictions. No need to run X11. It just works.

You have a better imagination than I do, then. I don't see how you can make acme run in text mode and still be acme.

Re: A Tour of the Acme Editor

#62

Post by sleepydog »

bbbertie wrote: post #33

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?

All you need is some sort of remote control for your tool -- for example, a way to open a file in an existing emacs instance. plumb is just a command like any other that provides global ipc between all your programs,

    plumb "path/too/foo.c"
runs the argument string through the gauntlet of plumbing rules. It's up to you to edit the plumbing rules to send the file to your editor.

Before I lost my hard drive, I had some udev rules setup that used the plumber to post notifications to a 9term window on my desktop when a USB drive was mounted. It's really dead simple, really makes you wonder about the proliferation of complex messaging systems like dbus.

Re: A Tour of the Acme Editor

#63

Post by rsc »

klrr wrote: post #22
luriel wrote: post #2

Acme was also Dennis Ritchie's editor of choice, there is a picture of him and his working environment here: http://acme.cat-v.org Also wish Russ had shown acme in a full screen setup, one of the most awesome things about acme is how well it manages having tons of windows, and you don't get a real feeling for it without seeing it done in a real full screen large environment.

Isn't it annoying to program without syntax highlight? Or is it just some false rumor I've heard that acme doesn't have that feature... it looks a lot like wmii. I have to try it though, emacs and vim really sucks, too bloated for my taste, I'm still not that hardcore that I use ed for programming so I'm searching for an simple, minimal and correct alternative to emacs and vim....

For a number of years in the mid-1990s I switched between Borland's IDE when using DOS and vi (not vim) and later sam when using Unix. The fact that one world had highlighting and the other didn't have it had no effect on my productivity, at least not one in favor of highlighting. It never occurred to me that I should miss it on Unix or that it was annoying not to have it. They were just different tools that did different things.

I know lots of people have strong feelings about this highlighting or that, but honestly, just try going without it for a week or two. I bet you'll find it is not that big a deal after all.

Re: A Tour of the Acme Editor

#64

Post by DeepDuh »

Avshalom wrote: post #29
klrr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it annoying to program without syntax highlight? Or is it just some false rumor I've heard that acme doesn't have that feature... it looks a lot like wmii. I have to try it though, emacs and vim really sucks, too bloated for my taste, I'm still not that hardcore that I use ed for programming so I'm searching for an simple, minimal and correct alternative to emacs and vim....

It varies from language to language I'm sure but in C there's enough syntax and sigils and what not that it's easy to parse visually without colorized hints. Just keep your code window small enough that it doesn't make your eyes glaze over.

I think you hit the nail on the head. I have no problems using C or Java without highlighting, but I wouldn't want to use Python or even Fortran without it, there's just not enough guidance for my taste.

Re: A Tour of the Acme Editor

#65

Post by p9idf »

derleth wrote: post #54
p9idf wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer no syntax highlighting because I wear glasses, and the resulting chromatic aberration makes it difficult to read.

My glasses are likely stronger than yours [1] and I've never had a problem with chromatic aberrations. Are you nearsighted, farsighted, or something else? [1] (How strong? Well, the current frames I'm wearing aren't the frames I initially chose; they're the frames I chose out of the set of frames that have the earpieces connected far enough back to allow them to fold closed given the thickness of the lenses I wear. T…

I doubt the dispersion is caused by any specific properties of my lenses but rather by how my preferred desk arrangement makes me often look off the lens' axes. I could get contacts, but since reading programs is the only time it bothers me, and I otherwise like the rainbows, I just tell all my programs to show normal monochromatic text.

Re: A Tour of the Acme Editor

#66

Post by hollerith »

rsc wrote: post #25
EdiX wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 strivi…

I won't argue any of your points but one. You can use whatever system fonts you like on OS X. Here's some Comic Sans for you: http://swtch.com/~rsc/hackernews.png

A hint on how to achieve that would be greatly appreciated.

I tried starting Acme as follows, but no joy:

9 acme -F '/Library/Fonts/Comic Sans MS.ttf'

ADDED. After googling site:swtch.com, I tried the following two invocations, but still no joy:

9 acme −F /mnt/font/Monaco/13a/font

9 acme −F /usr/local/plan9/mnt/font/Monaco/13a/font

-- which is not so surprising as neither /mnt nor /usr/local/plan9/mnt exist.

ADDED. Actually, cannot get the -F flag to Acme to do anything. E.g., $PLAN9/font/luc/latin1CW.18.font exists, but Acme started with "acme -F $PLAN9/font/luc/latin1CW.18.font" uses the same font as Acme started with "acme".

Re: A Tour of the Acme Editor

#68

Post by klrr »

rsc wrote: post #63
klrr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it annoying to program without syntax highlight? Or is it just some false rumor I've heard that acme doesn't have that feature... it looks a lot like wmii. I have to try it though, emacs and vim really sucks, too bloated for my taste, I'm still not that hardcore that I use ed for programming so I'm searching for an simple, minimal and correct alternative to emacs and vim....

For a number of years in the mid-1990s I switched between Borland's IDE when using DOS and vi (not vim) and later sam when using Unix. The fact that one world had highlighting and the other didn't have it had no effect on my productivity, at least not one in favor of highlighting. It never occurred to me that I should miss it on Unix or that it was annoying not to have it. They were just different tools that did diff…

Okey, thanks. I'll try it. If I feel that it ain't really for me I think I'll just write my own editor. :)

Re: A Tour of the Acme Editor

#69

Post by mej10 »

jff wrote: post #31
mej10 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks. I find a lot of the Plan 9 stuff very fascinating, and I often think about what it would take to port some of the functionality to OSX.

I find it interesting that you mentioned the window management as being one of the big selling points. I have been working on a tiling window manager for OSX, and might try adding a mode like that. It would mean splitting my emacs into frames, which could be weird. Probably worth messing around with, though.

Also, I have several emacsclient based commands to do things like the plumber/acme, but is a pretty poor attempt at reimplementation.

Re: A Tour of the Acme Editor

#70

Post by [deleted] »

klrr wrote: post #68
rsc wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a number of years in the mid-1990s I switched between Borland's IDE when using DOS and vi (not vim) and later sam when using Unix. The fact that one world had highlighting and the other didn't have it had no effect on my productivity, at least not one in favor of highlighting. It never occurred to me that I should miss it on Unix or that it was annoying not to have it. They were just different tools that did diff…

Okey, thanks. I'll try it. If I feel that it ain't really for me I think I'll just write my own editor. :)

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