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Plan 9 from User Space

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Re: Plan 9 from User Space

#41

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

JHonaker wrote: post #36
pmoriarty wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest problem with acme is that it's so mouse-oriented. As a big fan of keyboard-only use of vim and emacs, this made acme a complete non-starter for me.

Your problem with Acme is you don’t grok Plan 9. [1] In Plan 9, everything’s a file. Acme in particular represents open buffers and windows as files on disk too. I don’t mean as copies of the text necessarily, but as sockets basically where you can send and receive data about a particular thing inside Acme. It’s kind of wild just how exposed it is. It’s not like you’re sending info to a single process server like an…

...no, I'm pretty sure my problem with acme - and plan 9, actually - is that it's so mouse oriented. Clickable text and mouse chords are not by any means a bad system, but what I really want to do is never have to take my fingers off the keyboard

Re: Plan 9 from User Space

#42

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

infinite8s wrote: post #40
JHonaker wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have heard of it. I wasn’t really trying to draw specific parallels between Acme and Smalltalk as similar editing environments. I was just lamenting that two of the most interesting pieces of software I’ve used recently are both older than me, and very little except for efforts to recreate those systems exactly on modern hardware has quite the same feeling of freedom and creativity. They really feel like they are t…

> In sheer volume, there are probably more people doing XeroxPARC level crazy stuff now than then. I'm not sure about that. From the Computer History Museum's 50th anniversary event of the Alto two days ago, each Alto cost about 18k in early 1970s dollars (about 100k today). And they built hundreds of them. Not sure anyone has the budget to do the level of crazy work that would require the equivalent amount of future…

I think the point that you don't need that level of money anymore. You could do the same level of exotic software on a Raspberry Pi for 50 bucks.

Re: Plan 9 from User Space

#43

Post by dexen »

nmz wrote: post #18
ryanolsonx wrote: post #2

Acme is an interesting text editor for development. I've used it for React.js development before. Because of how you can script it, I could run Prettier on save and a few other things you'd normally expect in the JS world.

If only it had keybindings.

Acme has a handful of keybindings, like the usual ^A, ^E for navigation, ^Z for undo, etc. Plugging in new ones is a few lines of code, for example my ^S for Putall (saving all windows):

https://github.com/dexen/plan9port/commit/78324a4666c4b5e0bd...

Most of keybindings you might want to add are handled by Acme's "commands" - like Edit. If you repeat them any often, it's easy and straightforward to connect the keybinding to the command in code. Alternatively, to avoid going into C, write a shell script with ready-made command; Acme is well prepared to be managed through shell scripts. The shell scripts have full access to Acme's Windows (open files, directories, scratchpads etc), including ability to edit content, open new ones, interpret right-clicks in new ways, etc.

Re: Plan 9 from User Space

#44

Post by LukeShu »

JHonaker wrote: post #25
butterisgood wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure I'd call Acme a big part of Plan 9, though it does follow the philosophy somewhat. I know folks who use 9front who would rather spend time in the Sam editor than use Acme, and they use 9front as their daily driver system. But I totally agree with you on the "do something weird" approach to learning and gaining inspiration. Some problems that are hard in some spaces are extremely easy to deal with in others.…

Yea, I was really just trying to say, Acme is part of the Plan 9 ecosystem for people that have never heard of either. For me at least, Acme is the quintessential P9 application, but I concede that it's Sam for most P9ers in history. It's probably more apt to say Acme is an excellent exemplar of the Plan 9 way. The file-based socket-y proto-RPC "plugin" way of doing things is intimately tied to Plan 9's design. And y…

I think the chain of influence flows from ex/vi to sam, not the other way around?

Re: Plan 9 from User Space

#45

Post by silisili »

Paul-Craft wrote: post #6

For those who are unfamiliar, Plan 9 from User Space a pun on Plan 9 from Outer Space, an infamously "so bad it's good" movie from the 1950s. It has this ridiculous bimodal distribution of review scores as a result: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/plan-9-from-outer-space https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052077/ratings/ https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/78785/10-out-world-facts... https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/2…

Having just watched it, I'll agree with the "so bad" part, but definitely not the "it's good" one.

Apparently plan 9 is specifically the space people's plan to resurrect the recently dead humans on Earth by shocking their pituitary glands.

Re: Plan 9 from User Space

#46

Post by pmoriarty »

JHonaker wrote: post #36
pmoriarty wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest problem with acme is that it's so mouse-oriented. As a big fan of keyboard-only use of vim and emacs, this made acme a complete non-starter for me.

Your problem with Acme is you don’t grok Plan 9. [1] In Plan 9, everything’s a file. Acme in particular represents open buffers and windows as files on disk too. I don’t mean as copies of the text necessarily, but as sockets basically where you can send and receive data about a particular thing inside Acme. It’s kind of wild just how exposed it is. It’s not like you’re sending info to a single process server like an…

What I don't get is why any of that should require a mouse.

Re: Plan 9 from User Space

#47

Post by msla »

silisili wrote: post #45
Paul-Craft wrote: post #6

For those who are unfamiliar, Plan 9 from User Space a pun on Plan 9 from Outer Space, an infamously "so bad it's good" movie from the 1950s. It has this ridiculous bimodal distribution of review scores as a result: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/plan-9-from-outer-space https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052077/ratings/ https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/78785/10-out-world-facts... https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/2…

Having just watched it, I'll agree with the "so bad" part, but definitely not the "it's good" one. Apparently plan 9 is specifically the space people's plan to resurrect the recently dead humans on Earth by shocking their pituitary glands.

There's a reason it was called "Grave Robbers From Outer Space" for a while, which is the title The Amazing Criswell uses in the intro.

Re: Plan 9 from User Space

#48

Post by LukeShu »

0x445442 wrote: post #33
pmoriarty wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest problem with acme is that it's so mouse-oriented. As a big fan of keyboard-only use of vim and emacs, this made acme a complete non-starter for me.

I used to think that way but modern mice and touchpads along with the relevant literature have convinced me that keyboard paired with mouse is more productive.

Keyboard with some mouse sprinkled in, sure. But Acme is very mouse heavy.

Re: Plan 9 from User Space

#49

Post by hulitu »

sovietswag wrote: post #34
JHonaker wrote: post #5

After a brief diversion with the Acme editor (a big part of Plan 9) and some modern Smalltalk environments (Squeak, Cuis, and Pharo), I can't help but feel like we are stuck in a very local optimum as far as UI/UX go. The insane amount of introspection available to you in a Smalltalk image, and the way every bit of text becomes a potential button or action in Acme just put the lack of creativity in modern interfaces.…

On the idea of being stuck in a local maximum of graphical interfaces, see the concept of “wheel of reincarnation” by Ivan Sutherland. http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/myer-sutherland... Rob Pike’s comment about this is very interesting too: Through the 1970s and 1980s, there was a continuous invention in how graphics, computing, and software interacted. With the dominance of the PC and the VGA card, we n…

> With the dominance of the PC and the VGA card, we now have a largely fixed architecture for graphics in personal computers

Unfortunately VGA as we know it is dead and now, to render the blinking cursor, they render the whole screen surface in a compositor.

Re: Plan 9 from User Space

#50

Post by LukeShu »

Paul-Craft wrote: post #9
bilegeek wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has the smoothest cut/copy/paste routine once you get it down. Moving text around is just buttery. I personally find the lack of highlighting and auto-delimiters is a PITA for HTML/LaTeX though.

> I personally find the lack of highlighting and auto-delimiters is a PITA for HTML/LaTeX though. Sadly, I have not used acme. Wouldn't this deficiency be simple to overcome with scripting? I guess that's one particular area where emacs, being essentially a specialized LISP interpreter, encourages you to think about these things by default.

Perhaps you could script auto-delimiters. But it has no ability to format the text; you couldn't add syntax highlighting with scripting.
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