Acme for Windows 176
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."
disambiguation (Score:5, Insightful)
As always, the central question of 'what's this story about?' is not a link. Sigh.
Wait, what? (Score:5, Funny)
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."
Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wait, what? (Score:2)
This looks awfully like EMACS.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:2)
So fix it!
Re:Wait, what? (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:Wait, what? (Score:3)
I consult wikipedia frequently, but I also check other sources and take some articles with a certain amount of salt, because some of the admins (just a few, I am sure) are total cunts.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:3, Funny)
"cat ~/comment.txt > /dev/gui/firefox/slashdot/comment_input_box"? Come to think of it, that *would* be awesome :O
Re:Wait, what? (Score:2)
> the tachyon coefficient to the digital anomoly drives, we can invert the neutrino
> wave probe." And Patrick Stewart says, "Do it."
Actually, I believe the correct phrase is "make it so"...
Try It It's Great (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:disambiguation (Score:2)
The summary shouldn't read like a begining of a news story - the links are functional, just out of place. Look at older stories compared to today.
Re:disambiguation (Score:2, Informative)
(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...)
Re:disambiguation (Score:2)
Re:disambiguation (Score:2)
Acme sucks! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Acme sucks! (Score:2)
Re:Acme sucks! (Score:1, Funny)
But yet he continues to buy from them. Just like a Microsoft user.
Not that there is anything wrong with that...
Re:Acme sucks! (Score:2)
Rob Pikes 1994 paper (Score:5, Informative)
wmii (Score:5, Informative)
Re:wmii (Score:3, Funny)
One of the new features: You can move blocks of text by waving your mouse in air in specific manner, throwing the block of text a specific distance in the file depending on the strenth you swing the mouse.
Abaco (Score:2, Informative)
Re:wmii (Score:2)
Hmmm.... (Score:4, Interesting)
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, [wikipedia.org] as my tech writing professor would say? I'm talking about figure-ground separation [google.com] 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.)
--JoeRe:Hmmm.... (Score:2)
I've been using plan9 for 10 years and my eyes are not bleeding.
Re:Hmmm.... (Score:2, Interesting)
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, [swtch.com] 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.... (Score:2)
I use it all day every day, and it's the best UI I ever used, and I've used quite a few.
Re:Hmmm.... (Score:2)
Re:Hmmm.... (Score:2)
All the fonts are configurable, even TrueType anti-aliased fonts.
Plan9/inferno uses bitmap fonts so you have to prepare each size you wish to use.
There are no menus, just key words.
Feel free to add spaces between them them any time, or remove some or add more, it's just text.
Menu bars on the left is a choice, you could re-write Acme to put them the other side if you thought it wise.
Yours add visual clutter for me, I already know that up is up and down is down, I don't need icons
Re:*chuckle* (Score:2)
this is my desktop : http://www.maht0x0r.net/desktop.jpg [maht0x0r.net]
I am indifferent to your opinion.
> It's obvious you're not interested in winning converts
take it, leave it, whatever
http://cm.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/ [bell-labs.com] was all it took me.
Re:*chuckle* (Score:2)
Re:Hmmm.... (Score:2, Interesting)
The rio (1) [swtch.com] window manager gives me flashbacks to TWM, [swtch.com] and gawdy color schemes inspired by 256-color displays.... More screen shots here. [swtch.com] 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 [plig.org] instead? :-) (Of course, anyone can make any window manager look bad. [plig.org])
--Joe
Vi vs Emacs vs Acme? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Vi vs Emacs vs Acme? (Score:2)
It's the anti-christ for people who complain about having to use a mouse or who love keybaord short cuts.
I spent the bulk of my time in my honours year with wily (an acme "clone" for unix/X11) running full screen - well I guess the bulk of the time was really spent playing risk, bulk of my working time... If you happen to like the interface and it suits you way of doing things it's an extremely productive environment.
Of course anyone who fits in that category already uses it,
Re:Vi vs Emacs vs Acme? (Score:5, Informative)
Still not clear. (Score:5, Interesting)
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. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
I'm underwhelmed (Score:2)
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.
Re:I'm underwhelmed (Score:2)
It's not some amazing leap in technology it's just a progam that puts text on the screen for you to edit.
If you don't try it you'll never know if it's methodology suits you better - though if writing a vim macro or two to do such thing seems like a good approach to you I suspect you're not going to like it at all. I'd put my money on you hating it and B2ing Exit pretty quick.
Re:Still not clear. (Score:2)
Re:Still not clear. (Score:2)
Oh yes, because the whole idea was you couldn't remember the argument syntax and hence needed to run man find first, and then edit a conveniant example in the manpage to do you find the files modified after this date, between these sizes, and whatever else, and then of course only wanted to open one of the returned files not all of them.
Obviously there's nothing you can do in acme that you can't do with vi and the shell - both vi and the shell provide you wit
Re:Still not clear. (Score:2)
Re:Still not clear. (Score:2)
It is different than emacs because it has a very small set of commands which interact very well with each other to provide all the functionality that emacs provides. It also has a completely d
Re:Vi vs Emacs vs Acme? (Score:2)
Re:Vi vs Emacs vs Acme? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Vi vs Emacs vs Acme? (Score:2)
Then once the debugging session stops and gdb says "stopped at somefile.c:43" you right-click
Re:Vi vs Emacs vs Acme? (Score:2)
Re:Vi vs Emacs vs Acme? (Score:2)
Regarding mouse vs. keyboard efficiency: http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.ht m l [asktog.com] is a good starting point on the mouse-speed vs keyboard-speed debate. I cringe every time I have to ^C ^V, and Tog advocates it, but the material on perceived vs real speed is worth looking at.
Re:Vi vs Emacs vs Acme? (Score:2)
Which is what I think acme does - remove the point/select/execute workflow interruptions by driving all of them to the mouse with a consistent interaction model. Although it relies on the mouse for po
Re:Vi vs Emacs vs Acme? (Score:2, Informative)
Hmm... (Score:1)
That's right! You never know when or where we will strike!
Looks interesting, but does it fold? (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Re:Looks interesting, but does it fold? (Score:2)
Re:Looks interesting, but does it fold? (Score:2)
It would basically be similar to hiding columns in a spreadsheet. Makes perfect sense to me...
Re:Looks interesting, but does it fold? (Score:2)
Re:Looks interesting, but does it fold? (Score:1)
Re:Looks interesting, but does it fold? (Score:2)
Re:Looks interesting, but does it fold? (Score:2)
Re:Looks interesting, but does it fold? (Score:2)
Occam & folding editors (Score:2)
I don't know if KROC has been ported to
Gah! Wrong link! (Score:2)
Re:Occam & folding editors (Score:2)
I used Occam for a while, and I'd have to disagree... it had many nice aspects, but feature-wise it lacked (for a good reason) some of the most useful features around. In particular, it didn't have any dynamic memory allocation at all. This meant that it was easy to statically prove properties of an Occam program, but... no dynamic data structures really cramps your style!
The really nice thing about Occam
Re:Looks interesting, but does it fold? (Score:2)
Re:Looks interesting, but does it fold? (Score:2)
No affiliation beyond satisfied customer and occasional bundle contributor.
Re:Looks interesting, but does it fold? (Score:2)
When 90% of the code is tucked away behind n levels of fold, it becomes hard to see exactly what's going
Re:Looks interesting, but does it fold? (Score:2)
This will show you the half dozen styles of folding supported by vim. If you've
got vim version 7, folding rules are now part of the syntax definitions that you're
already using for syntax highlighting. To take advantage of that, type ":set foldmethod=syntax".
I haven't tried that yet (don't use folding much when coding...just in config files), so
I can't vouch for how good an experience it is.
Torrent (Score:3, Informative)
what acme is about (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Bah! (Score:1)
Can it be better than EditPad [Lite]...? (Score:1, Offtopic)
The paid version also does heaps for web makers (in HTML, etc)
and programmers (using other languages).
Re:Can it be better than EditPad [Lite]...? (Score:2)
3D? (Score:5, Funny)
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?
Re:3D? (Score:4, Funny)
I don't know about this... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I don't know about this... (Score:3, Informative)
How about the BAT keyboard [infogrip.com], CyKey [demon.co.uk] or other chorded keyboards [wikipedia.org]?
Re:I don't know about this... (Score:2)
Re:I don't know about this... (Score:2)
seems pointless to me (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:seems pointless to me (Score:2)
Eivind.
[1] Last year with vi keybindings, and then dropping emacs altogether and going with vim for about five years now.
Re:seems pointless to me (Score:2)
Interesting (Score:2)
Eivind.
Re:Interesting (Score:2)
Rob Pike did much more than a Slashdot interview (Score:5, Informative)
These ignorant kids of today
Try his famous book The Unix Programming Environment [amazon.com]...
Yuck (Score:2)
Quite unprofessional.
Yet another unusable pre-alpha release (Score:2)
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
Re:Yet another unusable pre-alpha release (Score:2)
By the way, people have already listed the Acme paper above, which may help.
Aw, you gave up way too soon (Score:2)
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
Re:Aw, you gave up way too soon (Score:2)
This software only needs one thing -- a good way to trick unsuspecting people into trying to use it!
Hey, what if we wrote it up and put it on Slashdot?
Re:Aw, you gave up way too soon (Score:2)
This is not an OFFICIAL port btw. (Score:2)
just FYI
Excels in one area (Score:4, Funny)
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!
Re:Excels in one area (Score:2)
Re:Excels in one area (Score:2)
Okay, that's not quite fair. From a design standpoint I think Acme is brilliant and I'll probably look at it again in more detail (I used it a few years ago, but briefly). From a practical standpoint, nothing I've
Re:Excels in one area (Score:2)
From a user interface standpoint, one obvious advantage is that of affordance [wikipedia.org]. Any text in acme affords the command of that name. Command key combinations are hidden out of sight - "Put" is visible and evident, as are "Undo", "Redo", etc, etc.
And when TFP cheerfully described how Acme doesn't have an internal concept of global search and replace but rather relegates th
Re:Excels in one area (Score:2)
Criminy! (Score:2)
and a paaaaartridge in a pear treeee!
Doesn't emacs have all this?
Re:Criminy! (Score:2)
Re:Sam? (Score:2)
Re:Not to troll or anything... (Score:2)