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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."
Worthwhile read: "Acme: A User Interface for Programmers" (PDF). Its a bit outdated but explains acme beautifully.
Plan 9 from Bell Labs.
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.
The Wikipedia article is crap. Rob Pikes 1994 paper: Acme: A User Interface for Programmers explains what acme is. Also check out the introduction documentary when you first start acme.
Plan 9 from Bell Labs.
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.
Why not fork?
Holy synchronicity Batman.
I just installed the Inferno virtual machine on my Windows box last night because I didn't want to gunk up my Linux and BSD boxes. Plan9 is a sort of Unix the Next Generation, to continue the Star Trek motif. Sam - dunno, haven't got that deeply into it yet, but I gather it's 'sed, the Next Generation' - an editing command set. Oberon (again with the odd synchronicity, as I installed Oberon on my 486 before it died back when) is basically an academic operating system in which everything on the screen was both a display of information and a command interface. 9P seems to be a sort of protocol for communication that relies on the "everything's a file" thing being carried to its ultimate conclusion. Plan9 is kind of conceived as a distributed system in which there's no real distinction between 'local' and 'remote' because *everything* can be mounted and accessed from wherever. Mouse chording is simply a really annoying mechanism whereby you might hold a mouse button while pressing a key. A middle-click, hold, keystroke, and release, is distinct from a middle-click.
As far as the editor itself, Pike compares to Emacs in the sense that it's a shell, file manager, window manager and editor (and more) all rolled into one. It's also kind of like running vim with 'Sexplore', only - again - much more thoroughgoing. Except he makes the distinction that Emacs is bound to the 'teletype' concept and era. Plan9 is heavily GUI-oriented and mouse based. However, it's GUI in the sense of windowed text and clickability, not in the sense of pretty icons. It's more like every text object is a sort of icon. But there's no 'pictographic' icon that doesn't *say* anything.
So, yeah - distributed networked next-generation GUI mouse Unix. Sort of. And the editor is an all-in-one interface.
Unfortunately, Plan9 is actually nothing new. It's like Unix guys seeing a mouse and saying 'Oooh, look what Zog do' and going overboard, while retaining a kind of X11R4 look'n'feel. And, being a vim user and keyboard-centric and whatnot, myself, I find it interesting in a sort of theoretical sense, but not anything genuinely usable or even the right direction to go.
*My* question is, what does this Windows editor port do that I didn't do last night by just installing Inferno? It was a simple thing to do and gives me rio, acme, and so on and so forth. Also, Plan9 from User Space has been available to Linux and BSD users for quite awhile, AFAIK.
Sorry if this is a bit breathless and incoherent, but hopefully more detailed than the technobabble writeup. And, as I say, it's still pretty new to me. That's just my rough perception of things.
Maybe I underrepresented what you could do. There is no UI beyond the the text buffers. All the editor commands (cut copy paste, browsing directories, etc.) are "Acme shell" commands. Pipe the results of ls to a buffer and do the proper mouse chord on a selected file name in the results and it would open that file. All the menus/buttons are actually just text files. Sure you may be sitting there with your Vi or EMACS and saying "I can extend my editor thru scripts etc., type M-x whatever or :!some_filter % but Acme let's your File, Edit etc. type things that would normally be menus in a gui text editor be simple text files, editable from within acme itself. I don't know how much it gains you over other ways of extending editors but it is a novel concept.
Why not fork?
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...
I see now I picked a very poor example, something to easily done in a shell . Imagine a text editor along the lines of Notepad or Nedit. Now imagine that those menus across the top weren't really menu widgets, but rather another text buffer you had open. You can add your own commands, you can customize for what your working on. Also imagine that the results of make are piped into another buffer. When there is an error, you can highlight the part some_file.c:67 and use a mouse chord, Acme will open that file and move the cursor to that line number. Likewise you can pipe grep results to a window and do a similiar thing with selecting filenames, etc.
Why not fork?
Is it just me, or does this look quite a bit like Nikolaus Wirth's Oberon system, which also mainly consisted of a mouse-driven text editor?
(It's concept and usability also sucked galaxy clusters through nanotubes when I had to use it for doing exercises during my computer science studies, but that's a different story - although I can't believe that ACME would be much better...)
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
"If someone could figure out how to do one handed typing"...
How about the BAT keyboard, CyKey or other chorded keyboards?