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A Tour of the Acme Editor

Russ Cox

6.5K subscribers • 3 videos on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 12 people: 11 on Hacker News and 1 in engineering communities.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2012 to 2025.
  • Presented by Russ Cox

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

150K views14 years ago12 recommendations

Tools and practiceHistory and cultureVim, Emacs and editorsOperating systemsHistory of computing

Russ Cox demonstrates the unique mouse-driven interface, text-based command execution, and filesystem integration of the Plan 9 Acme text editor.

Acme is a text editor originally written for Plan 9 but now available on Unix. This is a brief tour of what it's like to work with. See research.swtch.com/acme for more information.

Why it's here

12 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as an excellent overview and demonstration of the powerful, minimalist ideas behind the Acme text editor.

teerayon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Why Atom Can’t Replace Vim – Learning the lesson of vi”

It's sad that Acme hasn't been mentioned at all. While its mouse-oriented nature is a little strange coming from Vim, there are some very awesome ideas in it. For one: It lets you write plugins in anything you like. This is because all aspects of the editor are exposed as a filesystem a la /proc. Need to create a new window with some custom contents? Create a new file. Other awesome ideas: The text in that custom window can be actions because any text can invoke commands by using another mouse button. Russ Cox has a great video tour of Acme's features here: link to this video
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marttton Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: Is there other software similar to Vim and Emacs?”

Rob Pike's acme text editor for the Plan 9 operating system: link link to this video (excellent overview of the editor by Russ Cox) And acme's predecessor sam: link You'll need plan9port to run acme on Linux, though. But the core ideas are very simple and powerful (sam: everything is a huge string; acme: everything is a clickable file) and thus hopefully long-lasting. I would also mention edbrowse, a line-oriented web browser initially for blind people. Maybe this is too far on the fringe, though. It does have a lot of depth (excellent scripting capabilities); it's an amazing project actually: link
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alganeton Hacker News • Recommends

On “Starship: A minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell”

On tmux, I use split panels more often than tabs. Usually, there will be from 2 to 8 panels of different sizes. This gives me spacial short term memory: I know what each shell is by the panel position. I can zoom on then to bring them full screen (ctrl+b z) if I'm going to do anything that requires more space, then zoom out to the panel arrangement when I'm done. Sometimes I'll name prompts (eg `PS1='stg$ '`), specially when working with ssh, but that's rare. What inspired me to work this way was this video on the acme editor: link to this video
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mdonahoeon Hacker News • Recommends

On “UsesThis: Rob Pike”

If you haven't seen acme in action, it is pretty crazy and interesting. Basically it makes heavy use of the mouse, and any typed word can be invoked like a command. Here is a tutorial. link to this video
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muraikion Hacker News • Recommends

On “Why GNU Emacs?”

I found link (no affiliation) to be the best way to finally learn vim in the sense of actually developing automatic muscle memory. It teaches you how to use vim using a 2d game. It's worlds better than the built in vim tutorial, to say the least. :) For a really different take on editors+shells, check out acme: link to this video
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Esauon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: What is your favorite YouTube channel for developers?”

I have to say that I had no use for YouTube until I realized that these kind of talks were on there. In addition to what you mentioned, some I like: The Gruqg on OpSec: link Russ Cox's ACME tutorial: link to this video Jessie Frazelle on running containers on the desktop: link
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black_knighton Hacker News • Recommends

On “Adventures in /usr/bin and the likes”

Acme, the text editor from Plan 9 has this. Piping, inputing and outputing from commands are some of the most basic operations there. Check out: - link - Russ Cox' tour: link to this video
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hawskion Hacker News • Recommends

On “A curated list of Terminal frameworks, plugins and resources”

Pretty close to what you describe is Acme 0 the text editor/shell from Plan 9. It is mouse oriented edit. You can right click on words to search them in file or open text files, directories or compiler errors. I recommend viewing this 1 introduction video. I miss few things in Acme. A bit more WIMP-y familiarity and a 3 button mouse. That's why I'm working on experimental text editor inspired by Acme 2. 0 link 1 link to this video 2 link
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rakooon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Become Shell Literate”

…hether to show a summary view or the full diff, or restrict the list to some files. Have another window where you can write some message, and a GitCommit command in the "Tag" of the window will use the whole buffer as a git commit message; boom, you have 60% of what I use git-cola for. A bit more information can be seen by one of its creator here: link to this video . The possibilities are truly endless, and I haven't seen anything that resembles it. There is just no editor that embraces your platform the way Acme does. No, Emacs is not the same, because Emacs doesn't integrate with your OS; Emacs is an OS unto itself. You can't really say it's integrated to the OS wh…
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AceJohnny2on Hacker News • Recommends

On “In Praise of Plan 9”

A great way to get a feel for Plan9's concepts and their power is Russ Cox's (of now Go fame) Tour of the Acme Editor: link to this video
View on Hacker News

gwpon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: Looking for a Programable Text Editor”

Acme: link It can do everything Emacs can but it's so lightweight it almost doesn't exist. Its power comes from the fact that it brings your external tools together. It can be programmed using its filesystem (9p) interface, and extended by adding plumber(4) rules. A demo by Russ Cox: link to this video
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u/Qoc_au_vinin r/vim • Recommends

Antithesis of Vim: Acme, a text editor controlled mostly by three buttons of the mouse
2View on Reddit

u/atonal174in r/emacs • Mentions

Ways for making Emacs' interface behave more like Acme? This is Plan 9's Acme editor: link to this video I don't mean either recreating Acme's themeing (or lack thereof) and any of the surface level stuff, or perfectly imitating Acme's low level file-oriented representations. But a mouse oriented way to open up files, execute basic commands or manipulate windows is very attractive once you see acme and I didn't find anything similar in Emacs.
14View on Reddit

lake99on Hacker News • Mentions

On “Emacs setup for Python development”

There is Acme for Plan9 1 and it has inspired a few other editors. I don't use them myself because they don't have syntax highlighting. 1: demo at link to this video
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andrewchamberson Hacker News • Mentions

On “Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?”

Personally, I can't find a text editor I like. The closest I came was acme from plan9, shown here link to this video . I would love to see an editor which clones acme, but follows a few of the modern ui conventions.
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genson Hacker News • Mentions

On “The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy”

…am for the simple things like text editors. I agree. People are people and people will always be subjective. But there should be a distinction between feature bloat and node.js bloat. Still, ofc, to each his own. (I measure how good it is for me by how much hair i pull out by using it, be it by lack of features, bugs, performance, or anything) 0 link to this video and link…
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