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."

Comments

Try It It's Great

[nickgra]

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/

Hmmm....

[Mr Z]

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.)

--Joe

Re:Hmmm....

[Mr Z]

Well, I suppose if you use a nicer font and space the menu labels further apart than is shown in screen shots like this one, it could be reasonable to work with. That, and ditch the ancient X11/Athena style scroll bars for something a little more contemporary, and we'll talk. :-)

Since you've been using Plan9 for 10 years, do you have any counterargument-making screen shots of your own?

--Joe

Re:Hmmm....

[Mr Z]

The rio (1) window manager gives me flashbacks to TWM, and gawdy color schemes inspired by 256-color displays.... More screen shots here. I'm not saying GNOME or KDE have the best look either. I actually was happy with OpenLook / OLVWM. If I have to go to a window manager look that's 10-15 years old, can I go to that one instead? :-) (Of course, anyone can make any window manager look bad.)

--Joe

Looks interesting, but does it fold?

[mad zambian]

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?

Still not clear.

[jd]

Emacs can have macros, run shell scripts, etc. DEC VMS' default editor - EVE - supported DCL (DEC Command Language) script. uMicro's OS (ghastly as it was) was fully object-oriented, in that everything was an object and you could run whatever methods you liked on that object.

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!

Re:Still not clear.

[sholden]

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.

In acme *all* text is a potential command. You middle click and it executes the selection you clicked on (expanding if the "selection" was nothing - ie. if you click a on anywhere on the word make it runs the make command), you can chord to select a region and execute it in one go.

Of course that means that anytime the text "rm -rf $HOME" appears in a document if you are stupid enough to select and middle click it bad things will happen. Of course the target audience knows better.

Because everything is editable and executable text you end up doing things like typing the command you can't quite remember the arguments for (find for example), selecting it, chording on the word man somewhere, editing the example text in the displayed man page to be the command you want and then chording it to run that command. Then of course you right click the output of that find command to open the file you were looking for.