Acme (text editor)

Acme is a text editor and graphical shell from the Plan 9 from Bell Labs operating system, designed and implemented by Rob Pike. It can use the sam command language. The design of the interface was influenced by Oberon. It is different from other editing environments in that it acts as a 9P server. A distinctive element of the user interface is mouse chording.

Overview

Acme can be used as a mail and news reader, or as a frontend to wikifs. These applications are made possible by external components interacting with acme through its file system interface.

Ports

A port to Inferno operating system is part of Inferno's default distribution. Because of Inferno design it can be run as an application on top of another operating system. This allows Inferno's port of acme to be used on most operating systems such as, Microsoft Windows and Linux. A project called acme: stand alone complex intends to make acme run as a standalone application on the host operating system.

A working port of acme for Unix-like operating systems is included in Plan 9 from User Space, a collection of various ported programs from Plan 9. This version may be used on Linux and is included by some Linux distributions.

References

External links

Pike, Rob Acme — A User Interface for Programmers. (1994). .
acme(1) acme(4), the manuals.
Plan 9 from User Space (aka plan9port) is a port of many Plan 9 programs from their native Plan 9 environment to Unix-like operating systems, including Mac OS X.
acme stand alone complex - A distribution of the Inferno version of acme packaged for Windows, OS X and Linux and including many extras and tools (an IRC client, a wiki client, a web browser, a debugger, etc.)