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

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

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.