A Tour of Acme (2012)
research.swtch.com
A Tour of Acme (2012)
1–10 of 61 posts
Re: A Tour of Acme (2012)
#2[deleted]
Re: A Tour of Acme (2012)
#3Acme is an incredible, fascinating editor... that relies too much on rat wrestling to be useful to me. I really find it interesting how it takes advantage of Plan 9's aggressive Unix philosophy to provide functionality that would've been plugins or extensions in other editors as separate C programs or scripts.
But having to use the mouse for everything just drives me nuts. It's easier for my fingers to acquire even Emacs keybindings than it is for me to acquire the mouse and point at something with any precision.
Re: A Tour of Acme (2012)
#4That video gets off to a very slow start but by minute 10 or so some very interesting features are on display.
Some that stuck out were using filenames plus regexes or line numbers to create links in text files, a text file that is also a shell session, things that have been done in vi/emacs but this editor is mouse-centric so it looks very different.
Re: A Tour of Acme (2012)
#5Acme is an incredible, fascinating editor... that relies too much on rat wrestling to be useful to me. I really find it interesting how it takes advantage of Plan 9's aggressive Unix philosophy to provide functionality that would've been plugins or extensions in other editors as separate C programs or scripts. But having to use the mouse for everything just drives me nuts. It's easier for my fingers to acquire even E…
It is definitely an interesting editor, and it has some neat ideas. But when I compare the masterpiece that is Acme on Plan 9 with the — frankly — cobbled-together heap that is Emacs … I would prefer to use Emacs, because Emacs does more for me than Acme on Plan 9.
I think that says a lot about the fundamental power of dynamic languages in general and Lisp in particular. Plan 9 is in a lot of ways the zenith (or … heh … acme) of what C and Unix can do. It is awesome, it is wonderful, it is better in every technical way than Linux or true Unix. But it pales in comparison to the hacked-together incomplete Lisp machine that is Emacs.
Imagine how much better off we would be with true Lisp machines on our desks and in our data centres!
(in my ideal world this 21st-century Lisp machine would actually take a lot of ideas from Plan 9, and even some from Emacs)
Re: A Tour of Acme (2012)
#6Acme is an incredible, fascinating editor... that relies too much on rat wrestling to be useful to me. I really find it interesting how it takes advantage of Plan 9's aggressive Unix philosophy to provide functionality that would've been plugins or extensions in other editors as separate C programs or scripts. But having to use the mouse for everything just drives me nuts. It's easier for my fingers to acquire even E…
It is definitely an interesting editor, and it has some neat ideas. But when I compare the masterpiece that is Acme on Plan 9 with the — frankly — cobbled-together heap that is Emacs … I would prefer to use Emacs, because Emacs does more for me than Acme on Plan 9. I think that says a lot about the fundamental power of dynamic languages in general and Lisp in particular. Plan 9 is in a lot of ways the zenith (or … he…
Have you had a look at Oberon? That's where Acme took most of its stuff from, and it being a fully integrated language, the interfaces between the parts are a lot cleaner.
That's what Oberon, Smalltalk and even Emacs Lisp have that's not as good in Unix. Files full of plain text plus executables are a good foundation, but they're also quite unstructured and so is communication between them. Command line parameter parsing is an absolute nightmare. Whereas if you use a language directly, that's just function parameters and you're also not restricted to arrays of strings as your sole communication format.
Not that Emacs is doing all that it can with that, as it's usually used as an intermediary between a high-falutin' language environment and text files.
Re: A Tour of Acme (2012)
#7Acme is an incredible, fascinating editor... that relies too much on rat wrestling to be useful to me. I really find it interesting how it takes advantage of Plan 9's aggressive Unix philosophy to provide functionality that would've been plugins or extensions in other editors as separate C programs or scripts. But having to use the mouse for everything just drives me nuts. It's easier for my fingers to acquire even E…
Sometimes it just feels faster to think about and execute keyboard shortcuts, although the actual tests I've read about that seem to be from the early Macintosh age, which feels a bit like measuring anything by looking at your university's students...
Re: A Tour of Acme (2012)
#8Acme is an incredible, fascinating editor... that relies too much on rat wrestling to be useful to me. I really find it interesting how it takes advantage of Plan 9's aggressive Unix philosophy to provide functionality that would've been plugins or extensions in other editors as separate C programs or scripts. But having to use the mouse for everything just drives me nuts. It's easier for my fingers to acquire even E…
It is convenient with a pointer or trackpad close to your thumb. Three buttons associated with such pointer or trackpad would be nice, but it would work much better with more buttons. Two or three buttons for each hand would be awesome.
Re: A Tour of Acme (2012)
#9Acme is an incredible, fascinating editor... that relies too much on rat wrestling to be useful to me. I really find it interesting how it takes advantage of Plan 9's aggressive Unix philosophy to provide functionality that would've been plugins or extensions in other editors as separate C programs or scripts. But having to use the mouse for everything just drives me nuts. It's easier for my fingers to acquire even E…
Sometimes it just feels faster to think about and execute keyboard shortcuts, although the actual tests I've read about that seem to be from the early Macintosh age, which feels a bit like measuring anything by looking at your university's students...
I don't understand what you're saying.
That evidence of keys being faster than the mouse are old?
Why would the speed change over time? It's measuring the human, not the machines; and we are no faster.
Re: A Tour of Acme (2012)
#10Acme is an incredible, fascinating editor... that relies too much on rat wrestling to be useful to me. I really find it interesting how it takes advantage of Plan 9's aggressive Unix philosophy to provide functionality that would've been plugins or extensions in other editors as separate C programs or scripts. But having to use the mouse for everything just drives me nuts. It's easier for my fingers to acquire even E…
It would not be infuriating if basic movements were possible using the keyboard, such as the classic left-down-up-right.
As for key binding, it’s pretty easy to add that as external tools, thanks to the 9p interface.