Re: [9fans] Emacs

[Don <north_@www.7f.no-ip.com>]

> What?  The vi & emacs pages say nothing of any use, sam is
> a basic, raw text editor, and acme - see sam.  Little motivation?
> I would think that having a full featured editor would be quite
> appealing to a developer.
>
Acme has everything I need and I'm more than ur avg developer ;)

> Not to be offensive, but sam seems
> like notepad.  Surely you would agree that emacs is better than
> notepad.
>
I would agree that emacs is better than notepad, but sam != notepad. U
would be wise to learn how acme/sam works before makin' this statement.
I've been developing my operating system in Acme and I love it. Not only
can I test all my code in my Autumn virtual machine directly in acme, but,
I can use plumbing to pipe information to/from acme windows thru the
virtual machine. Not only that, but, Acme has a great simplicity to it.
You can use any Acme win as a shell, directory browser, application win,
text editor, etc. Acme, in its simplistic splendor, is more than I ever
wanted in an editing environment. Sometimes the simple solution is, after
all, the best solution.

> Anyway, I'm embarking on a project which only requires a
> C compiler and an editor.  I thought I'd do it on Plan 9 but,
> to be perfectly honest with you, I really have to have a powerful
> editor in order to remain productive.
>
I think once you got used to using plan9's theory behind windowing you
would find plan9 is a prime environment for development. Not only do I
use plan9 to develop my OS in, but, I also use plan9 daily to audit
large projects like bind/apache and other operating system source code.
I've never been more happy with an editor. BTW, the Dump feature is
killer for projects spanning multiple days.

Hopefully, before you dismiss acme as a powerful editor you will continue
to research the reasoning and theory behind plan9 and acme? I realize it
is rather different style from traditional UNIX editing as well as the
Emacs style of editing, but, it is absolutely worth the little effort of
researching the theory. Didn't you have to learn about Emacs before you
were happy with its utilization and all the 'powerful' processing
techniques u employ? Same thing, bro.
Don