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Acme is Plan9's equivalent to Emacs - a quasi OS / Windowmanager / Filemanager / Mailreader... and much much more, but in contrast to Emacs its also an fairly good text editor ;-)
In contrast to Emacs, Vim and so on, Acme makes heavy use of the mouse, even more: Without a mouse Acme is simply not usable (but this is also true for the complete Plan9 System). It takes some time for an oldschool keyboard jockey like me to embrace this new paradigm, but after i got it, i never want to go back. The basic controls are pretty much self explanatory, but there are a few "unconventional" naming conventions and functions normaly not available:
The weird / funny / cool part is, that you can just type a new button anywhere... want to read your mail? Simply type "Mail" anywhere, click on it with the middle mouse button... and voila! A new window with your mailbox opens up. You want to take a screenshot? Easy: Just type cat /dev/window | tojpg > /tmp/acme.jpg, select it, middle click, and now you got a screenshot:
(Oh, by the way: Did you notice that i just created a screenshot by simply cat-ing the active window? This is just a little example on how Plan9's "Everything is a file" principle works... but more on this in a future post)
So far i can say it is a weird (because its just SO DIFFERENT) but after some adjustment time extremely cool and productive way to get things done.
Definitively worth reading is the paper from Rob Pike on Acme, which is also included with the Plan9 distribution:
