What is Reddit's opinion of
acme?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
11 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
Firstly, if you've been scared of tiling windowmanagers (awesome, xmonad) in the past, this is different! These are manual tilers. Windows will not suddenly rearrange themselves and jump around the screen when you spawn more, and can be handled much like the tabs you are accustomed to on your web browser.
I'd like to also mention wmii, the project i3 was inspired by/somewhat based on. I still think wmii is superior in a few ways, especially for the beginner - there's a lot more mouse control (right click menus, window dragging, etc.), the window management logic is much easier to understand (1D with psuedo-2D elements rather than full-2D), and arguably basic configuration is easier (everything exposed in a dash script/filesystem). That said, i3 is definitely the more active project, has strong documentation both in and out (ohloh.net rates i3 as good and wmii as bad in terms of code-comments) and is likely more bug-free as well.
Ultimately, though, i3 still saddens me. wmii's goal was to create an Acme version of a windowmanager in a very Plan9-esque way, but fell short of the mark. You can get an idea of how powerful and flexible Acme is from this recent video. wmii was really aiming high, and is now slowly dying, so it's sad to see the only successor not take up the same ambitious mantle.
software shown:
fvwm menus in top screenshot are the menus that appear when clicking on the desktop. left, middle, and right buttons respectively.
let me know if you want any specific config. i don't feel comfortable posting all of my dot files yet because i haven't completely scrubbed it of sensitive info.
software shown:
fvwm menus in top screenshot are the menus that appear when clicking on the desktop. left, middle, and right buttons respectively.
let me know if you want any specific config. i don't feel comfortable posting all of my dot files yet because i haven't completely scrubbed it of sensitive info.
I met Dennis Ritchie in '94.
Mild mannered man in a lab coat promoting Plan9.
I zoomed in on his name tag, d-damn -- this is Dennis Ritchie.
He zoomed in on my name tag with a funny look and a smile,
I had the name "ACME" on my name tag.
Later I found out what ACME was.
I always wondered if I gave him a glitch in the matrix moment.
Why not just use Acme? The developer is still using it himself. Rob Pike.
On their webpage. There are related programs listed there.
Like
https://github.com/knusbaum/Wily
There is also
Acme.
I like this editor enough that I bought a real 3-button mouse to use it. It integrates with the unix environment seamlessly, and structural regexps are the single most useful tool I've ever used to manipulate text.
Do note that mouse interfaces aren't a Bad Thing, but they are often poorly designed. The acme editor from Plan 9 is a good example of a well-designed mouse interface that greatly increases editing speed. Don't give up on the mouse quite yet!
If you like the idea of total customizability, check out dwm. It's less than 2k SLoC, configured by changing the C source and recompiling (which is not nearly as hard as it sounds). It does a fantastic job of not getting in the way.
> Does middle-button paste count as chording?
Not really. In mouse chording, the mouse buttons are viewed more like a keyboard, where a button can be a modifier to a different button.
I would provide an example myself, but linking to the mouse usage instructions of an application making use of mouse chording is probably better. Although I think that application does not implement it the best possible way, it serves as a decent example.
> Do I need two more buttons?
A lot of modern mice have "forward" and "back" buttons. Whether you find them useful depends a lot on your use case. I usually map one of them to a scroll-modifier, so I can scroll by moving the mouse (or in my case the track ball) up and down.
The mouse is a more powerful tool than what most "tilers" would dare to admit (see mouse usage in acme as an example). Be careful not to fall in the "mouse is evil" trap, it is mostly a matter of taste, and balance.
Also, be careful not to mix up window managers and tiling window manager. Many window manager would be totally useless/unusable without a mouse for example (openbox, fvwm, evilwm, rio, cwm, ...).
acme is a gui application as it was developed on plan 9 which was designed as gui only though it can run a console terminal (usually when you screw up your boot so ed to the rescue). There is a nice youtube video by rux cox explaining its function. there are also many other resources on various plan 9 sites like cat-v.org.
So a little more depth:
If you think about how you take notes in school on paper, you can look at your notebook as a file you keep appending to. So I treat every note as an individual file. so a single recipe is a single text file. I use the date command in acme to print the date and just append to the notes, each append gets a timestamp so I can keep track. e.g. if I take a note and come back a week later to add to it I just append and note in the append why I changed my mind. e.g. if I'm working on a program and have an architectural idea that I wind up realizing is not optimal I'll append that reasoning with a date stamp. It's like a mini diary.
Bigger projects will go in a directory so I can keep not only notes but also other files like pictures which were an inspiration or any other file that is part of the project.
I use the Acme text editor and I find this useful because I can just right-click the output of the Src command to read the source code for a command quickly and easily, which is something I do often.