10.08.2025 00:20:45 ron minnich <[email protected]>: > It's not that acme does less. It does things on an orthogonal axis to emacs. > In emacs, to get more capabilities, people tend to resort to lisp. In acme, > to get more capabilities, people resort to building tool pipelines that *they > can also use outside acme*. To me, that's very important. Emacs solutions > typically only work in emacs (true for vim and zed and on and on ...) whereas > acme can be a way to prototype things that can be used outside acme. > > That's kind of plan 9 (to me) in a nutshell: not special purpose solutions > for single tools, but solutions that work across a wide range of tools.
I can give you another acme example. Some time ago I ported part of the writer's workbench (wwb) to plan 9, just because I was curious. Because I'm mainly using acme, I wrote some very small helper scripts that can call the wwb tools from within acme, and transform the output to something that suits plan 9 world (plumbable text). The thing is, wwb knows nothing about plan 9, or acme. It was built for Unix and has probably never seen a plan 9 system before. Making it work in acme is just a standard rc script (and rc doesn't care about acme), and is only a matter of calling the program and piping it's output through sed for some processing. Looking at the code of wwb, I assume it was written in a time where everything on Unix was written with ed. I guess they'd print out the issues wwb found, then run ed to fix them. They probably had no other editor, or at least no visual one. Btw, I occasionally use those tools when writing. Since I'm not a native English speaker, they sometimes help a lot. There are more modern tools out there, but they probably won't work on plan 9. sirjofri ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T9209adeaba1b3a8a-M917c97458209424cf48036ea Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
