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.
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.
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?
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.
Very. The poster pointed to a better reference but copying that into wikipedia would be a copyright violation. And the article already contains a reference to that paper.
Is it really that hard to understand that some people might not be able to write a better description than is already available and hence just point to that existing well written publically available document?