Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?

[Paul Donnelly <paul-donnelly@sbcglobal.net>]

jason.catena@gmail.com (Jason Catena) writes:

> I've been wondering for years now why Acme (and Wily, which I used
> first) only display text files.
>
> It seems to me that the content of an Acme window could be anything: a
> picture, a postscript or PDF file, a star chart, a web page.  Keeping
> with the spirit of small parts brought together, Acme could outsource
> the displaying of the content to another program, place its output in
> the Acme window, and operate on it by sending commands from the tag to
> the rendering program.

Hi, I don't know anything about anything, but it seems to me that it's
more productive to look at the question the other way around: why not
modify Rio to tile windows like Acme does? Acme is a text editor, so
it's no surprise that it handles text only. If you want tiled windows
you can display arbitrary graphics in... well, there's already an API
for graphics (and input).

If you wrote up a general API for sending commands to windows, then you
could write a window system that tiled windows and provided tags to
execute commands from. I think that would be a very good thing,
FWIW. Not that there aren't other issues to consider to make the system
as usable as Acme, for example how the “applets” in this system are
going to interoperate with each other.