A Tour of Acme (2012)

I use Acme (from Plan9Port) as my every-day editor for work. I run it full-screen on a 4K monitor. I&#x27;ve got a co-worker who likes to grumble about mice, but somehow when we&#x27;re debugging something on a call, I&#x27;m always in the appropriate file at the appropriate line number long before he is :) There are some tools (acmego [9fans.net&#x2F;go&#x2F;acme&#x2F;acmego], A [github.com&#x2F;davidrjenni&#x2F;A]) that make working with Go a lot more pleasant, too.<p>I&#x27;ve been using Acme for about 15 years now, though. I dimly remember deep frustration when I was still learning it, but now that I&#x27;m used to it it&#x27;s great.<p>Here&#x27;s a screenshot that shows my typical work layout, although it&#x27;s a little &quot;manufactured&quot; to avoid including any proprietary code from work: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;Trg79NS.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;Trg79NS.png</a>

Acme is an incredible, fascinating editor... that relies too much on rat wrestling to be useful to me. I really find it interesting how it takes advantage of Plan 9&#x27;s aggressive Unix philosophy to provide functionality that would&#x27;ve been plugins or extensions in other editors as separate C programs or scripts.<p>But having to use the mouse for everything just drives me nuts. It&#x27;s easier for my fingers to acquire even Emacs keybindings than it is for me to acquire the mouse and point at something with any precision.

I&#x27;ve been using acme for ~6 years now and it&#x27;s still my daily editor. I wrote a LSP client for it (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mjibson&#x2F;acre" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mjibson&#x2F;acre</a>). acme is so weird because when you start out it&#x27;s like &quot;wait so I have to write little shell scripts to do everything?&quot;. But then it slowly dawns that larger programs (like acre) are possible that are much more interactive, like modern IDEs.

There is a nice Tcl&#x2F;Tk port of Acme: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.call-with-current-continuation.org&#x2F;ma&#x2F;ma.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.call-with-current-continuation.org&#x2F;ma&#x2F;ma.html</a>

I&#x27;m using it as my day to day tui (with an scratch buffer). I have a index file where I store &quot;shortcuts&quot; to lot of fs places. Also I store action logs of whatever related to shell. For example, a file rabbit.md, it starts with the snippet to portforward the k8 service.. but I also have there some curls to clean or manage things. Files are more or less like a notebook (but everything can be executed or it&#x27;s just a mix... I can live without it..

That video gets off to a very slow start but by minute 10 or so some very interesting features are on display.<p>Some that stuck out were using filenames plus regexes or line numbers to create links in text files, a text file that is also a shell session, things that have been done in vi&#x2F;emacs but this editor is mouse-centric so it looks very different.

Quite disappointed, I was expecting a tour of the ACME factory, purveyor of fine items to coyotes in the southern desert ....

pretty cool. I think I could use thisas a pretty damn cool dotnet core code editor with some tweeks.

i used acme to write my summer project at MITLL during my 2016 internship!

Acme must be very useful in a Plan9 system. But on UNIX, I don&#x27;t see any single thing it does that cannot be done by vim, with some configuration. And of course vim can do more.