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I remember when this was first published, I watched the video and then rushed to install plan9port and try Acme. I used it for a couple of days before going ba
by gnuvince 11y ago
I remember when this was first published, I watched the video and then rushed to install plan9port and try Acme. I used it for a couple of days before going back to Emacs, but Acme did leave a very positive impression on me.
- I really like how "unixy" of an editor it is; you can easily add new editing commands by writing a small program that reads from stdin and writes to stdout and use it to manipulate text within Acme. Of course, that program could be a shell script, a Python program or a Java program; Acme only cares that it can give and receive text.
- The editor has a mount point that contains the configuration of the editor and this can also be manipulated by external programs to influence the editor.
- The concept of addresses (e.g. an address into a file, an email address, a URL, etc.) and being able to click on such an address and have the editor DWIM is very powerful.
- I still don't know how to classify Acme: is it a minimal or a kitchen sink editor? You can make it do anything you want, but out of the box it is extremely bare. Is it a programmer's editor or a general purpose editing tool?
I'm not leaving my trusty Emacs, but I'm happy that I took some time to get to know something that was completely different.
- i4k 11y agoIt's definitely a programmer's editor. Some notable programmers used acme (Dennis Ritchie, Russ Cox). A lot of very great ideas/softwares were written inside acme (plan9, UTF-8, Go, etc). But I agree that it's not the best choice for some languages or environments.