Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

["James A. Robinson" <jim.robinson@stanford.edu>]

Random thoughts on acme, sam, and the acme clone wily...

I've never used the real acme for any length of time, but I did use wily
for many years under Linux and Solaris.  For the past year or so I've
been using sam as my main editor.  I just installed the latest Inferno
updates and have played around with the new Inferno acme (now with Edit!).

One thing that wily had in commmon with acme was the concept of a scratch
window, and it had the ability to have guides.  While I liked that,
I also very much like sam's ~~sam~~ body.  The concept of a window for
edit commands to run on the active window is very nice.  With wily,
if you execute >, <, or | commands, it runs it on the selected text in
what it thinks is the active body.  That's a nice feature, similar in
concept to the ~~sam~~ window.

The reason I like an entry window or scratch space which works on the
most recent selecteed text is that I don't have enough space to work in
the tag.  Because acme uses full file names, often I find myself with
not much space in the tag for |, >, or < commands. I know it will scroll
along, but for some reason I just don't like typing commands into the
tag when the front half gets scrolled off the left-hand edge.

I don't know if Plan 9 acme takes advantage of shell variables, but the
one in inferno doesn't appear to.  One thing nice about wily was that
you could have defined $pisa_util/JournalLister.java to reference the
file /home/jimr/proj/pisa/src/org/highwire/util/JournalLister.java.

Now that acme has the Edit command, sam's power is available but,
unless I'm missing something, it's still a bit of a disconnect using
Edit on a window.  Using the tag works, but it is kind of restrictive
in terms of space (I often use varitions of x/pat/ { nested commands }).
Using Edit commands picked up from a scratch body  (cut, paste, move to
target body's tag and paste into Edit) works well enough, but I'd really
love to see an ~~acme~~ body which just knows the last active body, and
lets me execute commands I type in or mouse2 on.  I'm curious whether
or not anyone else has the same interface tastes?

My other thought is that, if an ~~acme~~ window were created so commands
ran on a server on the other side of a wire, it would be very fast to
make edits on large files, since all the data could be processed on the
server side -- you would only pull down updates to the visible portion.
I know Rob mentioned he had thought about a client/server approach to
acme, and think that is an awesome idea.


Jim