Slashdot Mirror
Acme for Windows
jacoplane writes "You may remember Rob Pike from his Slashdot interview. Since his interview, his two-dimensional text editors have experienced many improvements and ports including license improvements. A port to Inferno has been around for awhile. Recently a standalone version has been made for Windows based on the Inferno port. Linux users are in luck as the native port is now legally distributable."
his two-dimensional text editor
As always, the central question of 'what's this story about?' is not a link. Sigh.
egypt urnash minimal art.
...just ask Wile E. Coyote!
Circumcision is child abuse.
Worthwhile read: "Acme: A User Interface for Programmers" (PDF). Its a bit outdated but explains acme beautifully.
Plan 9 from Bell Labs.
I read this and I imagine Data saying "Captain. I have an idea. If we reverse the tachyon coefficient to the digital anomoly drives, we can invert the neutrino wave probe." And Patrick Stewart says, "Do it."
If you like acme, check out wmii, a window manager inspired by acme (amongst other things). It is incredibly innovative, and version 3 was just released.
Hi, Don't knock it untill you've tried it! I've been using (and modifying) acme within Inferno for a year now and I won't be going back! Hopefully This stand alone version will get the rest of the lab hooked on it too. http://www.caerwyn.com/acme/
Ok, seem to remember hearing about some really neat usability features in the Plan 9 interface awhile back. I'd be useful if some were recapped here... Also, is it just me, or do these Plan 9 GUIs combine eye-bleeding fonts with poor Gestalt, as my tech writing professor would say? I'm talking about figure-ground separation and all these things that separate a GUI from a big jumble of text.
(Given that I'm having a hard time finding good links for Gestalt and figure-ground separation mean my tech-writing prof was ahead of his time, or a total crackpot? I happened to really agree w/ everything he taught.)
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
Not only did I have to dig to understand what the story was about, I'm still not entirely sure.
So, a text editor existed for a very small niche operating system. There already were unofficial ports if you really wanted it. After reading the Wiki page, I'm not entirely sure what makes this text editor special.
But now there is a LEGAL port for Linux users. Great.
That's all we need is another text editor to argue over.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
some of the links are already unresponsive. I bet they weren't expecting a website about a text editor to get Slashdotted!
...and leave a smoking crater where the server was.
That's right! You never know when or where we will strike!
This looks like it could be fun. Certainly a new and baroque method of blowing your own feet off. I have skimmed the pdf and this looks like a fun tool to play with.
On a vaguely related matter..
I have been looking for an editor that does folds.
If I have to scroll through hundreds or thousands of lines or code, I would love to be able to take a chunk of code that I am not interested in seeing right now and fold it out of sight, with an indicator that there is a fold in the text.
Functions that has been tested, comment blocks etc etc.
What else you could do with folded blocks (cut, copy...) ? Not really botherd, but I would still love an editor that let me fold. (I can do the spindle and mutilate just fine already)
I know the Occam development system for Transputers had an editor that folded but I have not seen one since.
Anyone?
Trying to associate Microsoft with "fun" is like trying to associate Satan with aromatherapy. -Tycho
Bit Torrent of acme:sac for Windows.
Plan 9 from Bell Labs.
It's misleading to call acme a text editor, though it can edit text.
It's an alternative user interface that attempts to make better use
of mice than many systems do. Read the above-cited paper if you're
curious.
WinVI all the way baby!
Sig sig go away come back another day
T.U.G.
Free, easy to use & WYSIWYG... Does one really need more?
The paid version also does heaps for web makers (in HTML, etc)
and programmers (using other languages).
The post is worthy of general reading. Mod up insightful please.
Plan 9 from Bell Labs.
his two-dimensional text editors
How does it differ from a three-dimensional text editor? Is that one where the letters get stuck in your nose such that you have to grab a Kleenex if you make a typo?
Table-ized A.I.
I just don't get the idea of a text editor that relies heavily on the mouse. Keyboard shortcuts seem like a much better idea, since your hands are already on the keyboard when you type. Plus, I find it difficult to quickly click on text with the mouse, since it consists of a bunch of tiny little rows and letters. I tried Sam (another mouse-centric text editor) for a while, and while I thought mouse chording was a really neat idea (one I'd like to see applied more often, although it's not really possible with my touchpad), I never did get to like mouse-based text selection. Does anyone who has got the hang of it want to enlighten me? Whenever I click on text I end up way off, but in the general area, and have to slowly move in on it. Do you get much more precise with practice?
I don't know if KROC has been ported to Plan9/Inferno yet, but it damn well should be.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
KROC is here. The other is some long-forgotten package, as opposed to a long-forgotten language.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
What's amazing about Plan 9 is the kernel, the file system, and the overall design.
The user land utilities, GUI, and GUI applications are applications only a mother could love; porting them to another platform seems pretty pointless. Note that the ideas behind acme really aren't all that original--they're derived from the equally unsuccessful Oberon interactive environment.
Putting a Linux userland on top of a Plan 9 kernel or implementing Plan 9 kernel features in Linux (either in the kernel or in userland) would seem useful to me, but porting the Plan 9 GUI?
It is nice that people are thinking about new interaction paradigms, but I just don't think this is a good one. If you want this kind of flexible, multi-purpose windowed environment aimed at expert users, Emacs is probably still your best bet.
There is also a new web browser called abaco for Plan 9 that is progressing fast.
Plan 9 from Bell Labs.
Geez, if the Slashdot interview is all people remember... ;-)
These ignorant kids of today
Try his famous book The Unix Programming Environment...
Acme: Stand Alone Complex... makes me wonder...
I wonder if this can be used to begin coding the AI used in Tachikoma
You will be baked, and there will be cake.
Emacs certainly can do folding on both programming and text files (outline-mode) - and possibly for other file types. It also has selective display which hides lines on the basis of indentation which would work for many file types not otherwise covered.
I absolutely love playing with new technology - can't get enough arcane, bizare and downright weird programs that do stuff that's novel or just plain strange. I hope ACME fits into this category, but as the above list shows, it has tough cometition before it qualifies as new & interesting (at least to me). Being able to store scriptlets in one window to apply to another might qualify, if there's some new tangent to it. Oh, and I'd have to be sure that the method used to apply scripts in this way did not pose a security issue -- the vast majority of all the viruses currently for Windows are macro viruses, and the early (AT&T) history of Unix includes tales of viral backdoors.
Trust me, I want to be convinced, if for no other reason than I'm running out of new programs to play with. The nightmare of withdrawl symptoms, suffering from stale sameness... It doesn't bear thinking about!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Thanks for the feedback guys. I shall have a look and experiment.
Apart from the vi derivatives. I know I will end up as a smoking pair of boots for this, but I always thought that vi was short for Vile.
Medic!
Trying to associate Microsoft with "fun" is like trying to associate Satan with aromatherapy. -Tycho
Ahh back to the good ol' days... when the editors were on crack
"I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google"
What about sam?
This actually made digg.
Plan 9 from Bell Labs.
This program (the Windows standalone) is very much broken and doesn't seem to work at all on my Japanese copy of Windows XP. When I brought up the main screen and tried highlighting things, there was window drawing problems making the program look completely borked. Plus, what should I do if I want to run a shell command 'Del?' It might be in the docs, but by the time I might have gotten to documentation on that, the interface was destroyed.
Quite unprofessional.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
Great! We've already got spyware, adware and viruses. Time to get out the Roaccutane!
Oh, wait... Acme?
Join the anonymous, help develop the network: http://www.i2p2.de
This looks like yet another non-working pre-alpha release of something, with a twist: it's not even clear what it is...
I thought it was (or could be used as) a text editor in Windows, so I wanted to try it out.
It said somewhere to right click "Acme" for documentation.
Starting acme.bat opens a window in which you can indeed right click "intro" to see a man page about an obscure OS or something called Inferno. Unfortunately, right-clicking "acme" just gives "File not found".
To illustrate my comment, I wanted to copy stuff from these windows, but there doesn't seem to be a copy command: No copy menu, right-click doesn't give a menu, Ctrl-C doesn't seem to do anything. Ok, so the copy command is something else. This thing might have a much better way of copying text than what we are used to, but since the man page for Acme is "File not found"...
There may be great ideas hidden behind this thing, but I will never find out.
If an experienced IT professional and occasional programmer who is using Windows, Linux and Macs daily can't even see what this thing is suposed to do and can't read some documentation, then what's the point?
It's Caewyn's personal playings.
just FYI
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
The port to Inferno is offical. This is just making Inferno into a standalone package.
Plan 9 from Bell Labs.
For some reason I read it this way when I first saw it. Do I need to get out more?
This is quite simply the hardest software to pick up and figure out I have EVER encountered -- and I'm a pretty advanced user of vim _and_ developer studio. I can honestly say that in 20 minutes of playing around I had not yet established what the application was for.
Right click on the help link, 'acme(1)' and a window comes up called "/+ Error Del Snarf | Look". Hmm, I'd like to get rid of that. Click on the little box in the corner of the window. The window gets bigger -- not really big, just a _bit_ bigger! Ok, try right clicking on the little box. Now the window is really big! Further right clicks do nothing, but now a _left_ click makes it smaller again and I can see the window I started with, which is now only 1 line high. Try to drag the window divider -- no effect. Left click 'Del', right click 'del', double click on the window divider -- you can make it change size a bit but you can't close it.
Restart application and this time remember to _not_ click on the help link. Try to select text with middle mouse button because apparrently that 'executes' it in some way. Incomprehensible, uncloseable window reappears -- but THIS time it has a long list of lines starting with a # character in it! How to make it go away... maybe click left AND right buttons on the title bar? Er... I have now pasted some text into the title bar of the window. I edit it to say 'Del Snarf' again -- but something seems to have broken now. Better restart.
And so it goes.
Brilliant! I'm not actually going to try and use this ever again (because it's pre-alpha, it doesn't seem to do anything vim doesn't, and it's too mouse-driven), but it is one of my favorite pieces of software anyway because at least it's not just unix/java/lisp/MSVC 4.0 redone. It's something totally, utterly different.
And it is sooooooo haaaaaard to uuuuuuse! Ah, I love it, but I love it in an 'I am going to delete you now' kind of way!
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
You didn't even scratch the surface! Wait till you start trying to figure out how the scroll bars work! It's a mouse driven system... in which left-clicking on a scroll bar does _nothing_! You can't drag the tracker up and down! It's actually _less_ usable than an xterm scrollbar! But by right clicking, middle clicking, and left+right clicking, you _can_ eventually scroll back to the place you want!
OR CAN YOU?
This thing's great. Wait till you get to the bit where you middle-click and drag over a word to run a command (because pressing a couple of keys just wouldn't require enough dexterity!) and then you have to guess whether it will consider the 'command' to be a unix shell command, an internal editor command, a Plan 9 filesystem path... of course, while you're thinking about that you'll likely select a character too many, with catastrophic results!
This software only needs one thing -- a good way to trick unsuspecting people into trying to use it!
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
This is not a surprising considering that the MS OS has only just entered into puberity. I would say that some clearesel or Acutane might help.
Personally, I think ever MS OS, and apps like IE should come with a hefty does of aerosel Valtrex to spray in and out of your computer.
Otherwies, all things Micorsoft she be given thier MMR vaccince before entering the world.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
...but do we really need this in 2006? Seriously, it's based on a 1995 paper and with all due respect, it looks 1995 as well. What can this thing do that any modern text editor within Windows / a decent Linux desktop environment can't do?
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
So, this Acme editor lets you select any piece of text, and execute it as a shell command, with the results appearing in another window.
Maybe I'm missing something, but if I valued that functionality, I'm pretty sure I could have it in vim with a macro or two.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Hmmm. It sounds a bit like the early days of Lisp machines and Concordia.
and a paaaaartridge in a pear treeee!
Doesn't emacs have all this?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Here is an alternate download link for Acme http://www.bentoll.com/~rjdohnert/Acme.zip
The book was at the top of this interview.
Plan 9 from Bell Labs.
And I thought Linux zealots were annoying. :-)
In general, I give Bell Labs high marks for usable command lines. (I started with Bourne Shell almost a decade and a half ago, and use Bourne Again these days. Never could stand C Shell derivatives.) I've never been a complete fan of their UIs—going all the way back to the mouse pointer that points one of four directions depending on what quadrant you're in (with hysteresis!), such as the UNIX PC and 620 Terminal did from within Layers—so I suspect we'll just have to agree to disagree.
I'll stick to my eleventy-billion xterms and spartan X desktop, and you can stick to acme. It's obvious you're not interested in winning converts by actively demonstrating the flexability of your favorite solution, but rather just rely on unconvincing screen shots, an assertion of superiority, and feigning indifference to others' opinions and criticisms. I don't feel like rewriting acme in order to determine if I prefer it.
--JoeProgram Intellivision!