10 ms·

Edit: A Relaxing Mix of Vi and Acme

118 points by qznc 12y ago

imanaccount247 12y ago
This is fantastic. I felt like I was alone in thinking acme is great, but is missing a text editor. Nice to see I'm not the only one.
bulte-rs 12y ago
Lovely.... Now to get some command line utils to interact with a clojure repl and some form of splits (i.e. for documentation). This is actually something I might contribute to! :P edit: async is already in... mea culpa
- mpu 12y ago
  Splits are available in the git master branch.
  - bulte-rs 12y ago
    just noticed; very awesome. For some reason this editor gives me the same feeling I had "back when I was little" when I was using IDE's like Turbo Pascal's. It just feels... modern retro!
rcarmo 12y ago
Very nice. Wish it was on Github for easier contributing (and issue tracking).
- bru 12y ago
  >easier contributing Er... what? What's hard about contributing? You don't have to go through a web interface for everything? IMHO that makes it easier. $ git clone git://c9x.me/ed.git <do your changes> $ git format-patch --cover-letter <any other options you want> <commits> <edit the file if you want> $ git send-email <the file> `man git send-email` will tell you anything you need to know: configuration options, examples... If is well-written and straightforward! Seems like the author isn't interested in public issue tracking (yet), and using Github wouldn't have changed that. I, for one, celebrate that he's not using Github. I'm very afraid of the git == github trend I'm seeing amongst many people (technically semi-literate or even technical people)
  - allegory 12y ago
    Excellent points. Monocultures are terribly harmful, especially in the open-source side of things. While github is convenient, it's not the right answer for a lot of things and terribly inconvenient for others. I use git without github. I use it with vim outliner and keep the issues in the repo.
    - bru 12y ago
      You use vim outliner plugin for the issues? How does that work? Are your issues simple text files describing it? In a "issues" folder? Do you enforce a format? How do you track their status?
      - hrjet 12y ago
        Not the parent, but I do something similar for projects where I am the only contributor. It is far easier to track them with a simple text editor. For multiple contributors, I don't think this will scale well, atleast without using some tool on top of the VCS.
      - allegory 12y ago
        Yes. Indent per issue. One .otl file with all issues in it. No format enforced although I'm pretty consistent at writing issues. Once complete the issue is simply deleted. I've done this up to 4 people and it has worked wonderfully even though they had to learn vim :) You can pipe it through awk to remove any lines starting with a space/tab, sort it then then diff the result with earlier versions to work out progress etc as well.
  - rcarmo 12y ago
    I wouldn't mind bitbucket, either. Anything that would give this more exposure. And, seriously, e-mailing patches is tedious, error-prone and ultimately inefficient. _anything_ that smooths the path for contributors is paramount for a successful project, and I, for one, would love this becoming more than a one-off, niche thing. (I'd also like to have Alt-Enter instead of Tab on it, and a Mac port, and even though the first is trivial enough to do, the second requires a fair amount of time to implement)
micheljansen 12y ago
Looks like there are some differences with vi, among others: * "dd" is not implemented, use "d_" * "cw" will not work as in vi, use "ce" or "cl" * "r" is not implemented, use "cl" I think these are very common mnemonics, so I wonder why they are not implemented and if there are any plans to do it in the future. I use these all the time, so this would be a major turnoff for me.
- xiaq 12y ago
  Because they are not very reasonable? * "dd" isn't reasonable because it violates the "command + movement/region" structure of vi commands. So is "cc" and "yy". None of "c d y" is not a movement or region. Presumably in this editor "_" represents the "whole line" region, which leads to also "c_" and "y_". Much more regular although it does require you to lift your finger one more time. * "cw" isn't reasonable because "w" as a movement usually means "to the next word", but in "cw" it means "to the end of current word" instead. "ce" is indeed better. * "r" is actually not bad (indeed "rx" is equivalent to "clx<Esc>", but the former requires 2 keystrokes), but I guess it's because the author rarely uses it. Anyway the editor is pretty small, it might be easy or even fun to hack it! :)
  - philh 12y ago
    dd, cc and yy violate that pattern of vi commands, but they form their own pattern. (g~~ is another instance of it.) I agree that cw violates a pattern, but I think it's a reasonable violation. (Not necessarily good, but reasonable.
    - dllthomas 12y ago
      Given that you can get cw behavior with ce, I don't really think the original breaking of cw was reasonable (though I expect it went the other way and cw existed before vi settled into its current verb-noun philosophy). I agree with you on the doublings - probably makes most sense to preserve them.
      - philh 12y ago
xiaq 12y ago
I found this in the doc/ subdirectory of the repository: http://c9x.me/git/?p=ed.git;a=blob;f=doc/republic.txt;h=366f1543a185a1b2f6c5b4e8dbeac82715c15ee5;hb=HEAD http://c9x.me/git/?p=ed.git;a=blob;f=doc/republic.txt;h=366f... I am really curious about what the full text of Republic is doing here...
- jekub 12y ago
  Its probably for testing purpose. Its a big file of natural text so you can easily checks a lot of things with it and its a lot less boring than pages of lorem ipsum... But, its funny that it is more than half of the full content in the git clone...
  - xiaq 12y ago
    Ah, indeed. It turns out that the "doc" actually means "text documents" instead of "software documentation".
- mpu 12y ago
  I thought it could be fun to include it in the documentation. Why not, after all. This is a good read. It turns out that I also used it for tests, if the editor behaves smoothly on this file I judge it fast enough.
GuiA 12y ago
> you will also need cweb because one file is written in literate programming Glad to see there is a small village of indomitable programmers still holding out against the invaders :)
- computer 12y ago
  It's still fairly alive in the academic community, with things like Sweave/knitr/IPython workbooks/Maple stuff/etc.
prawks 12y ago
For people not familiar with Acme, I found this 20-minute video tour very informative: http://research.swtch.com/acme http://research.swtch.com/acme
- rcarmo 12y ago
  Also, I asked HN about modern Acme clones recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8269442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8269442 (glad this came along)
  - jonjacky 12y ago
    How about these (may have been mentioned on HN already, but not in response to your question): minime: http://daten.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/src/minime/README http://daten.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/src/minime/README, also http://blog.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/minime-a-minimalist-unix-text-editor http://blog.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/minime-a-minimalist-uni... JaKme: https://code.google.com/p/jakme/ https://code.google.com/p/jakme/
  - fmoralesc 12y ago
    I'm the developer of plan9-for-vimspace[1], which you mentioned in your thread. I've not been very active with it, because I came up against some limitations in vim, but I really want to go further with it. I would really like some feedback on what stuff should go in or out. I've thought a lot on how to implement acme's tag lines and a plumber system (just this weekend, I was thinking of providing a fuse-based system for that). [1] https://github.com/fmoralesc/plan9-for-vimspace https://github.com/fmoralesc/plan9-for-vimspace
    - tsuraan 12y ago
      Were the issues you hit being addressed by neovim (https://github.com/neovim/neovim https://github.com/neovim/neovim)? They seem to be pretty interested in making a more extensible vim.
      - 12y ago
roberthahn 12y ago
I hope the author of Edit is reading this thread. This sounds like a dream come true! The best form of encouragement is people using the software, but if the author wants us to wait, I'm cool with that - but I hope they make real progress quickly! Now I have the itch to fire up and work in Acme again :)
mzs 12y ago
That's neat, it reminds me of MPW and the scheme interpreter I used long ago on a mac, wish I could remember which one now. They had a worksheet where you could go back to a previous line with the keyboard or mouse and hit enter there (or edit it first and hit enter then) to execute. I had a very nice worksheet with lots of templates I would follow.
- wanderer 12y ago
  Eddie(Text Editor) by Pavel Císler has a worksheet like that.
imanaccount247 12y ago
I might just be missing it, but I don't see the license mentioned anywhere. Anyone know what it is?
- mpu 12y ago
  I hacked it. It's public domain for now. I might (or not) switch to MIT later.
  - fmoralesc 12y ago
    I don't think that's possible. If it's public domain, none can claim copyright.
mpu 12y ago
I'm glad to see such a positive reaction! I worked on that for quite a while and use it daily. I think the code is of pretty good quality (never had a segfault or data loss while using it). If you try it and encounter annoyances because it does not behave exactly like what you want, you have to hack in the code! I will never fix something myself if it does not annoy me. This does not mean that I did nothing for you, instead I tried a lot to make the code such that everybody can hack it, it is very regular, short, simple and occasionally well documented (vicmd.w, buf.c). I spent a probably unreasonable amount of time thinking on its design and I believe I came up with something satisfying, the code is only 3000 lines but one or two features I want remain to be hacked in. The undo and the buffer data structures were tested automatically for several hours with success (see the tools/ subdir), no data was ever lost. The file saving command is even formally proved correct in Coq. Any suggestion that could simplify the logic and preferably decrease the line count is more than welcome. Also, note that the version showed in the video is a bit deprecated, the master branch now supports better handling of async commands and window splits (vertical and up to 6 windows) with resizes using the mouse. Some are concerned about the license. It is public domain. But please tell me if you do something cool with it or like it.
- fmoralesc 12y ago
  Everything about this awesome, really.
demetrius 12y ago
A wonderful idea, but in the current state I can’t use it since it doesn’t support entering Cyrillic. In fact, vim doesn’t do the right thing with Cyrillic either (vim binds commands to entered characters, not keys; so when entering Cyrillic you either have to switch layouts when entering commands — or do some ugly hacks), but it’s at least usable. Edit is not, right now.

118 points by qznc 12y ago

This is fantastic. I felt like I was alone in thinking acme is great, but is missing a text editor. Nice to see I'm not the only one.

bulte-rs 12y ago

Lovely.... Now to get some command line utils to interact with a clojure repl and some form of splits (i.e. for documentation). This is actually something I might contribute to! :P edit: async is already in... mea culpa

mpu 12y ago
Splits are available in the git master branch.
- bulte-rs 12y ago
  just noticed; very awesome. For some reason this editor gives me the same feeling I had "back when I was little" when I was using IDE's like Turbo Pascal's. It just feels... modern retro!

rcarmo 12y ago

Very nice. Wish it was on Github for easier contributing (and issue tracking).

bru 12y ago
>easier contributing Er... what? What's hard about contributing? You don't have to go through a web interface for everything? IMHO that makes it easier. $ git clone git://c9x.me/ed.git <do your changes> $ git format-patch --cover-letter <any other options you want> <commits> <edit the file if you want> $ git send-email <the file> `man git send-email` will tell you anything you need to know: configuration options, examples... If is well-written and straightforward! Seems like the author isn't interested in public issue tracking (yet), and using Github wouldn't have changed that. I, for one, celebrate that he's not using Github. I'm very afraid of the git == github trend I'm seeing amongst many people (technically semi-literate or even technical people)
- allegory 12y ago
  Excellent points. Monocultures are terribly harmful, especially in the open-source side of things. While github is convenient, it's not the right answer for a lot of things and terribly inconvenient for others. I use git without github. I use it with vim outliner and keep the issues in the repo.
  - bru 12y ago
    You use vim outliner plugin for the issues? How does that work? Are your issues simple text files describing it? In a "issues" folder? Do you enforce a format? How do you track their status?
    - hrjet 12y ago
      Not the parent, but I do something similar for projects where I am the only contributor. It is far easier to track them with a simple text editor. For multiple contributors, I don't think this will scale well, atleast without using some tool on top of the VCS.
    - allegory 12y ago
      Yes. Indent per issue. One .otl file with all issues in it. No format enforced although I'm pretty consistent at writing issues. Once complete the issue is simply deleted. I've done this up to 4 people and it has worked wonderfully even though they had to learn vim :) You can pipe it through awk to remove any lines starting with a space/tab, sort it then then diff the result with earlier versions to work out progress etc as well.
- rcarmo 12y ago
  I wouldn't mind bitbucket, either. Anything that would give this more exposure. And, seriously, e-mailing patches is tedious, error-prone and ultimately inefficient. _anything_ that smooths the path for contributors is paramount for a successful project, and I, for one, would love this becoming more than a one-off, niche thing. (I'd also like to have Alt-Enter instead of Tab on it, and a Mac port, and even though the first is trivial enough to do, the second requires a fair amount of time to implement)

micheljansen 12y ago

Looks like there are some differences with vi, among others: * "dd" is not implemented, use "d_" * "cw" will not work as in vi, use "ce" or "cl" * "r" is not implemented, use "cl" I think these are very common mnemonics, so I wonder why they are not implemented and if there are any plans to do it in the future. I use these all the time, so this would be a major turnoff for me.

xiaq 12y ago
Because they are not very reasonable? * "dd" isn't reasonable because it violates the "command + movement/region" structure of vi commands. So is "cc" and "yy". None of "c d y" is not a movement or region. Presumably in this editor "_" represents the "whole line" region, which leads to also "c_" and "y_". Much more regular although it does require you to lift your finger one more time. * "cw" isn't reasonable because "w" as a movement usually means "to the next word", but in "cw" it means "to the end of current word" instead. "ce" is indeed better. * "r" is actually not bad (indeed "rx" is equivalent to "clx<Esc>", but the former requires 2 keystrokes), but I guess it's because the author rarely uses it. Anyway the editor is pretty small, it might be easy or even fun to hack it! :)
- philh 12y ago
  dd, cc and yy violate that pattern of vi commands, but they form their own pattern. (g~~ is another instance of it.) I agree that cw violates a pattern, but I think it's a reasonable violation. (Not necessarily good, but reasonable.
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    Given that you can get cw behavior with ce, I don't really think the original breaking of cw was reasonable (though I expect it went the other way and cw existed before vi settled into its current verb-noun philosophy). I agree with you on the doublings - probably makes most sense to preserve them.
    - philh 12y ago

xiaq 12y ago

I found this in the doc/ subdirectory of the repository: http://c9x.me/git/?p=ed.git;a=blob;f=doc/republic.txt;h=366f1543a185a1b2f6c5b4e8dbeac82715c15ee5;hb=HEAD http://c9x.me/git/?p=ed.git;a=blob;f=doc/republic.txt;h=366f... I am really curious about what the full text of Republic is doing here...

jekub 12y ago
Its probably for testing purpose. Its a big file of natural text so you can easily checks a lot of things with it and its a lot less boring than pages of lorem ipsum... But, its funny that it is more than half of the full content in the git clone...
- xiaq 12y ago
  Ah, indeed. It turns out that the "doc" actually means "text documents" instead of "software documentation".
mpu 12y ago
I thought it could be fun to include it in the documentation. Why not, after all. This is a good read. It turns out that I also used it for tests, if the editor behaves smoothly on this file I judge it fast enough.

GuiA 12y ago

> you will also need cweb because one file is written in literate programming Glad to see there is a small village of indomitable programmers still holding out against the invaders :)

computer 12y ago
It's still fairly alive in the academic community, with things like Sweave/knitr/IPython workbooks/Maple stuff/etc.

prawks 12y ago

For people not familiar with Acme, I found this 20-minute video tour very informative: http://research.swtch.com/acme http://research.swtch.com/acme

rcarmo 12y ago
Also, I asked HN about modern Acme clones recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8269442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8269442 (glad this came along)
- jonjacky 12y ago
  How about these (may have been mentioned on HN already, but not in response to your question): minime: http://daten.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/src/minime/README http://daten.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/src/minime/README, also http://blog.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/minime-a-minimalist-unix-text-editor http://blog.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/minime-a-minimalist-uni... JaKme: https://code.google.com/p/jakme/ https://code.google.com/p/jakme/
- fmoralesc 12y ago
  I'm the developer of plan9-for-vimspace[1], which you mentioned in your thread. I've not been very active with it, because I came up against some limitations in vim, but I really want to go further with it. I would really like some feedback on what stuff should go in or out. I've thought a lot on how to implement acme's tag lines and a plumber system (just this weekend, I was thinking of providing a fuse-based system for that). [1] https://github.com/fmoralesc/plan9-for-vimspace https://github.com/fmoralesc/plan9-for-vimspace
  - tsuraan 12y ago
    Were the issues you hit being addressed by neovim (https://github.com/neovim/neovim https://github.com/neovim/neovim)? They seem to be pretty interested in making a more extensible vim.
    - 12y ago

roberthahn 12y ago

I hope the author of Edit is reading this thread. This sounds like a dream come true! The best form of encouragement is people using the software, but if the author wants us to wait, I'm cool with that - but I hope they make real progress quickly! Now I have the itch to fire up and work in Acme again :)

mzs 12y ago

That's neat, it reminds me of MPW and the scheme interpreter I used long ago on a mac, wish I could remember which one now. They had a worksheet where you could go back to a previous line with the keyboard or mouse and hit enter there (or edit it first and hit enter then) to execute. I had a very nice worksheet with lots of templates I would follow.

wanderer 12y ago
Eddie(Text Editor) by Pavel Císler has a worksheet like that.

imanaccount247 12y ago

I might just be missing it, but I don't see the license mentioned anywhere. Anyone know what it is?

mpu 12y ago
I hacked it. It's public domain for now. I might (or not) switch to MIT later.
- fmoralesc 12y ago
  I don't think that's possible. If it's public domain, none can claim copyright.

mpu 12y ago

I'm glad to see such a positive reaction! I worked on that for quite a while and use it daily. I think the code is of pretty good quality (never had a segfault or data loss while using it). If you try it and encounter annoyances because it does not behave exactly like what you want, you have to hack in the code! I will never fix something myself if it does not annoy me. This does not mean that I did nothing for you, instead I tried a lot to make the code such that everybody can hack it, it is very regular, short, simple and occasionally well documented (vicmd.w, buf.c). I spent a probably unreasonable amount of time thinking on its design and I believe I came up with something satisfying, the code is only 3000 lines but one or two features I want remain to be hacked in. The undo and the buffer data structures were tested automatically for several hours with success (see the tools/ subdir), no data was ever lost. The file saving command is even formally proved correct in Coq. Any suggestion that could simplify the logic and preferably decrease the line count is more than welcome. Also, note that the version showed in the video is a bit deprecated, the master branch now supports better handling of async commands and window splits (vertical and up to 6 windows) with resizes using the mouse. Some are concerned about the license. It is public domain. But please tell me if you do something cool with it or like it.

fmoralesc 12y ago
Everything about this awesome, really.

demetrius 12y ago

A wonderful idea, but in the current state I can’t use it since it doesn’t support entering Cyrillic. In fact, vim doesn’t do the right thing with Cyrillic either (vim binds commands to entered characters, not keys; so when entering Cyrillic you either have to switch layouts when entering commands — or do some ugly hacks), but it’s at least usable. Edit is not, right now.