{"id":10428,"date":"2022-03-31T16:09:18","date_gmt":"2022-03-31T20:09:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=10428"},"modified":"2022-03-31T16:09:18","modified_gmt":"2022-03-31T20:09:18","slug":"an-emacs-user-looks-at-acme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=10428","title":{"rendered":"An Emacs User Looks at Acme"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019ve written before about the <a href=\"http:\/\/acme.cat-v.org\/\">Acme<\/a> editor. The first time it was about <a href=\"http:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=1177\">Russ Cox\u2019s video tour of Acme<\/a>. The second was <a href=\"http:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=1353\">Vince Foley\u2019s take on Acme as an Emacs user<\/a>. Those were almost 10 years ago so perhaps it\u2019s time for another look.<\/p>\n<p>Ben Hancock has a post entitled <a href=\"https:\/\/benghancock.github.io\/blog\/2022\/tao-of-acme.html\">The Tao of Acme<\/a> that is another Emacs user\u2019s look at Acme. His post differs from Foley\u2019s in that he came away from the trial an Acme convert. As I\u2019ve said before, there\u2019s a lot to like about Acme but there\u2019s also a lot the average Emacs user\u2014including me\u2014finds off-putting.<\/p>\n<p>First, Acme is almost completely mouse driven. Its author, Rob Pike, is a believer in mouse driven navigation and believes it to be faster than the keyboard alternative. Any Emacs user who has bothered to master Emacs navigation and uses something like <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/abo-abo\/avy\">Avy<\/a> to move around the visible buffer is going to beg to differ on that and probably adamantly take the opposing position. If your editing strategy includes eschewing the mouse at all times, you\u2019re not going to like Acme.<\/p>\n<p>The other thing that new Acme users complain about is the lack of syntax highlighting. Again, this is Pike\u2019s personal choice and was done on purpose.<\/p>\n<p>If the above doesn\u2019t bother you, there\u2019s a lot to like about Acme. A look at Cox\u2019s video will give you a good idea. A major difference from Emacs is that almost nothing is built in. If you need a specialized regular expression search, say, you provide it with a shell script. In a way, that means Acme provides an even more personalized environment than Emacs but at the cost of having to implement all your specialized commands yourself.<\/p>\n<p>Acme is an interesting editor that many might find attractive. It\u2019s available on most platforms now so you don\u2019t have to be running Plan 9 to use it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019ve written before about the Acme editor. The first time it was about Russ Cox\u2019s video tour of Acme. The second was Vince Foley\u2019s take on Acme as an Emacs user. Those were almost 10 years ago so perhaps it\u2019s &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=10428\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[55,18],"class_list":["post-10428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-editors","tag-emacs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10428"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10429,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10428\/revisions\/10429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}