Acme Programming Environment

Acme is a text editor/programming environment written for the Plan 9 operating system (see PlanNineFromBellLabs). It takes a substantially different tack than other windowing environments. Among its interesting properties are:

• heavy and effective use of the mouse, including mouse chords
• any and all text on the screen can be executed
• its "extension language" is the shell (rc, for Plan 9)
• TiledWindows
• no menus or icons

You might look at http://acme.cat-v.org to learn more about acme. And the paper describing Help, the precursor for acme: http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/1st_edition/help/

RussCox? (and friends) has ported much of the Plan 9 user-space to Unix-like systems. His plan9port package (PlanNineFromUserSpace) includes acme. See the home page at http://swtch.com/plan9port/.

The InfernoOs version of acme has been packaged with some extra goodies (wiki editor, irc client, etc) as a standalone program that can run on Windows, Linux and OS X under the name AcmeStandAloneComplex?: http://code.google.com/p/acme-sac/

GaryCapell (and friends) has written an acme imitation for Unix called wily. There's a home page at http://www.cs.yorku.ca/~oz/wily/index.html but wily is mostly deprecated in favor of p9p/acme and acme-sac mentioned earlier.

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The IonWindowManager organises ordinary managed windows in a similar fashion to Acme. The Wily page above mentions that using the window manager for, er, managing windows might be tidier. Is this a call for a window-spawning text editor with Acme's style of shell integration? Not sure. Will it work under screen(1)?

• The early implementation of wily spawned a new X window (process, actually) when you opened a new file. It was a total pain in the rear. I vaguely recall jumping on the window-tiling task pretty early on, but the revision control history might have something else to say about that. -- BillTrost

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Sounds like oberon-v4 to me but i never got that far to use it as a crossplatform ide (emacs replacement). see http://www.oberon.ethz.ch

-- EngelBert?

• Cedar (MesaLanguage development environment at XeroxParc) inspired the OberonOperatingSystem
• Oberon inspired acme
• Acme was written for Plan9
• wily (mostly) imitates acme
• Acme learned a thing or two from Plan9 (as GaryCapell said, "Now I am the master, Obi-Wan")
• Acme was ported to the InfernoOs so interoperability with Plan9 at the programmer interface was completely consistent
• Acme was ported to Unix as part of plan9port (PlanNineFromUserSpace)

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CategorySoftwareTool