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.
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
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)