Thanks for the links, one thing made me curious, can you elaborate on the choice of acme? are you running plan 9? I always thought plan 9 was a great idea but I never found anyone (near my circle or friends) who used it daily.
Plan 9 is UNIX taken so far some things you'd take for granted were changed. Some seasoned UNIX users don't like that. Development is active, as per my [1]
I don't run Plan 9 proper (yet); instead a POSIX port of some of its goodies: the Plan 9 from Userspace [2]. Works on virtually any POSIX OS.
In short, Acme fits me. Fast for common tasks (text navigation and mangling), powerful for ad-hoc text processing.
Acme is a bit of an oddball in UNIX land: strictly a GUI (requires a mouse with three buttons) blended with power of CLI tools and regular expressions. A good deal of text transformations happens via command language derived from sed (should be familiar to any Vi user). If you want to indent a block of text, you select it first and execute Edit s,^, ,g. Alternatively you can indicate the text with regular expressions.
A lot more happens via the good old UNIX pipe -- you can transform text, send as standard input and inject from standard output of a pipeline.
The Bell Labs guys figured some operations on text are done quicker using mouse. Cut/Paste are mouse chords. There is no separate `Copy' -- Cut & Paste back in place is quick enough. You can indicate place (or range) in file via regular expression, but you can indicate it by mouse -- often faster.
Acme yields to scripting very well. A script `learns' of the window (probably a file or directory pathname) it was launched from via the `$%' env variable and often operates on it. Programs are free to open new and modify existing Acme windows via simple `API' consisting of a bunch of files and directories. For me, a few scripts tailored for current project work better than a generic IDE. Any output appears back in Acme, which bodes well with the following:
Acme considers any text a potential hyperlink -- including directory listings and output of any program. Right-click on file name opens the file, on file:line expression opens file at that line etc. Also available file:/regular-expression; you can define more via plumber configuration. In general, clicking on a word causes it to be sent to plumber [3] and interpreted according to text processing rules & existence of files; an URL launches a browser, a man(1) indicator opens manpage etc. If nothing useful can be opened, the text is simply searched for in the current window. To navigate directory/file tree, you click on the names you want to go to.
A middle click executes commands. A dozen of built-in commands are recognized, all else is passed to shell. It's customary to prepare short snippets of shell code in place and execute them with middle click. Possibly appending arguments via a mouse chord.
Acme is a second iteration of GUI editor by Rob Pike; first is Sam [4]. They have a lot in common, especially the comman language.
Wow, thanks for the very good info. Think I will try acme, just to get a felling. Plan 9 from Userspace will be the way for me.
About the "soapdog" well, that is a silly story years ago trying to decide on a nick to register at a BBS and ghostdog was taken, had to decide on the spot because interstate calls were expensive, so looked at a soap bar and soapdog was the nick :-)
