From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <2fe524a16913f3478a49f494429e1945@proxima.alt.za>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] Resizing acme tags in plan9
Date: Sat, 13 Jan 2007 16:50:27 +0200
From: lucio@proxima.alt.za
In-Reply-To: <13426df10701130631t5ffd1266u8c9249751672c273@mail.gmail.com>
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> BTW, thanks for the multi-line tags. Once I had that, a task I had to
> do (converting several thousand lines of assembly to C) took little
> time at all.

What does the convergence of ACME and SAM actually look like?  It
seems to me that we could design the new generation Plan 9 editor from
the building blocks already provided instead of exploring the
labyrinth of possible options and unavoidable dead ends.

Typically, I think ACME's filesystem is fundamental to a Plan 9 editor
whereas window-pane placement ought to be controlled by individual
user preferences, particularly the heuristics.  To me, the expanded
tag is a SAM feature (hopefully) well integrated into ACME: I would
prefer if it resembled the SAM version a little more closely.

I also find SAM's remote editing ability very convenient, but in ACME
it may be better to implement this by separating the filesystem from
the editing commands so that remote editing can be done by applying
instructions to a remote ACME fileserver.  Not that I know what I'm
talking about, but it seems an option from a distance.

A feature that has been bothering me for a while is more applicable to
the shell, but perhaps it's worth presenting here.  Given a file
server and command interpreter, not unlike ACME's role, one could have
a virtual "bin" directory which contains scripts in the interpreted
language.  The ability to bind additional scripts to this directory
would provide something resembling "loadable modules".  Those scripts
that are compiled into the binary would in effect be "built-in".  The
idea came to me when trying to understand the various Plan 9 kernels
and my immediate thinking was "rc" and "tcl".  Has this idea ever
struck anyone else?  Has anyone implemented anything of this nature?

++L