Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
eeke...@fastmail.fm (Ethan Grammatikidis) writes: On Wed, 15 Jul 2009 09:25:51 GMT Paul Donnelly paul-donne...@sbcglobal.net wrote: jason.cat...@gmail.com (Jason Catena) writes: I've been wondering for years now why Acme (and Wily, which I used first) only display text files. It seems to me that the content of an Acme window could be anything: a picture, a postscript or PDF file, a star chart, a web page. Keeping with the spirit of small parts brought together, Acme could outsource the displaying of the content to another program, place its output in the Acme window, and operate on it by sending commands from the tag to the rendering program. Hi, I don't know anything about anything, but it seems to me that it's more productive to look at the question the other way around: why not modify Rio to tile windows like Acme does? Acme is a text editor, so it's no surprise that it handles text only. You may be thinking too monolithically. The draw device multiplexes itself so it shouldn't take much coding for acme to provide draw in addition to the other files it provides in /mnt/wsys. Mouse is just as important as draw and will need a little more code. Not only would acme need to multiplex it but it would need to emulate rio's behaviour. To quote Rio's man page: Opening it turns off scrolling, editing, and rio-supplied menus in the associated window. That isn't 100% true, scrolling isn't actually disabled but is not naturally accessible and looks very messy when you force it. What is true is that rio ceases to interpret keys specially other than backspace and return (curiously), and mouse events on the window are blindly sent to the application. It still doesn't sound like a lot of code, but may take some careful thought. Maybe that's a summary of Plan 9 methodology. :) That's why Rio seems like a more apropos starting point to me. :) It seems to me that the primary task of this hypothetical program would be providing /dev/draw to the programs running under it. Changing Rio's window layout code and adding a command protocol strikes me as less monolithic than combining window system duties with everything Acme already does. I also take issue with the statement Acme is a text editor, that never sounds right, no more than describing Emacs as a text editor. It's natural to use Acme as a text editor and it provides many more text-editing facilities than Rio does, but it is also natural to use it as a file manager, shell window provider, email client, etc, etc. It provides more than Rio and it does it all with tiling windows and without menus, but that's just style. Rio windows could seriously use a search function and one or two other text-editor facilities wouldn't go amiss. It doesn't seem natural to me that Acme does not allow graphical programs in it's windows. Fair enough. I just meant to say that Acme has a fairly focused design, which is oriented around the notion of windows containing text. If I wanted windows to potentially contain something other that text I'd reevaluate the design based on that criterion. And what I think I'd do would be as I described above, with the addition of a program that behaved like a single Acme window. FWIW, I don't think Emacs's design is perfect for a general application host either, although it's certainly a great program despite that. It's not like I'm some master software architect (and I see Rob Pike, who certainly has a more informed perspective on this than me, was thinking along the lines of Acme with graphics). I'm just saying my instinct is to decompose further and take as much out of the graphics/command host as possible. There are trade-offs either way, and maybe it would be more productive after all to mod Acme.
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
Maybe, it would also be great if the column-handle could react in the same way as the window-handle works: B3 to hide all other columns, B2 to show all and maximize the current column, B1 widen the current column. I don't know whether it is even possible in current design, nor, if it is, how complicated the coding of these features would be. Just an idea. I suspect also that it was already mentioned on 9fans. Greetings, ++pac. winmail.dat
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
c...@gli.cas.cz wrote: Maybe, it would also be great if the column-handle could react in the same way as the window-handle works: B3 to hide all other columns, B2 to show all and maximize the current column, B1 widen the current column. I don't know whether it is even possible in current design, nor, if it is, how complicated the coding of these features would be. Just an idea. I suspect also that it was already mentioned on 9fans. I would like that too, it always disappoints me when I right click the column box expecting it to expand :)
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 04:58, c...@gli.cas.cz wrote: Maybe, it would also be great if the column-handle could react in the same way as the window-handle works: B3 to hide all other columns, B2 to show all and maximize the current column, B1 widen the current column. wily does this
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
Maybe, it would also be great if the column-handle could react in the same way as the window-handle works: B3 to hide all other columns, B2 to show all and maximize the current column, B1 widen the current column. wily does this ufff, so could sb put his/her hands on it to bring this functionality back to native Acme? Thanks, regards, ++pac. winmail.dat
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
jason.cat...@gmail.com (Jason Catena) writes: I've been wondering for years now why Acme (and Wily, which I used first) only display text files. It seems to me that the content of an Acme window could be anything: a picture, a postscript or PDF file, a star chart, a web page. Keeping with the spirit of small parts brought together, Acme could outsource the displaying of the content to another program, place its output in the Acme window, and operate on it by sending commands from the tag to the rendering program. Hi, I don't know anything about anything, but it seems to me that it's more productive to look at the question the other way around: why not modify Rio to tile windows like Acme does? Acme is a text editor, so it's no surprise that it handles text only. If you want tiled windows you can display arbitrary graphics in... well, there's already an API for graphics (and input). If you wrote up a general API for sending commands to windows, then you could write a window system that tiled windows and provided tags to execute commands from. I think that would be a very good thing, FWIW. Not that there aren't other issues to consider to make the system as usable as Acme, for example how the “applets” in this system are going to interoperate with each other.
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
On Wed, 15 Jul 2009 09:25:51 GMT Paul Donnelly paul-donne...@sbcglobal.net wrote: jason.cat...@gmail.com (Jason Catena) writes: I've been wondering for years now why Acme (and Wily, which I used first) only display text files. It seems to me that the content of an Acme window could be anything: a picture, a postscript or PDF file, a star chart, a web page. Keeping with the spirit of small parts brought together, Acme could outsource the displaying of the content to another program, place its output in the Acme window, and operate on it by sending commands from the tag to the rendering program. Hi, I don't know anything about anything, but it seems to me that it's more productive to look at the question the other way around: why not modify Rio to tile windows like Acme does? Acme is a text editor, so it's no surprise that it handles text only. You may be thinking too monolithically. The draw device multiplexes itself so it shouldn't take much coding for acme to provide draw in addition to the other files it provides in /mnt/wsys. Mouse is just as important as draw and will need a little more code. Not only would acme need to multiplex it but it would need to emulate rio's behaviour. To quote Rio's man page: Opening it turns off scrolling, editing, and rio-supplied menus in the associated window. That isn't 100% true, scrolling isn't actually disabled but is not naturally accessible and looks very messy when you force it. What is true is that rio ceases to interpret keys specially other than backspace and return (curiously), and mouse events on the window are blindly sent to the application. It still doesn't sound like a lot of code, but may take some careful thought. Maybe that's a summary of Plan 9 methodology. :) I also take issue with the statement Acme is a text editor, that never sounds right, no more than describing Emacs as a text editor. It's natural to use Acme as a text editor and it provides many more text-editing facilities than Rio does, but it is also natural to use it as a file manager, shell window provider, email client, etc, etc. It provides more than Rio and it does it all with tiling windows and without menus, but that's just style. Rio windows could seriously use a search function and one or two other text-editor facilities wouldn't go amiss. It doesn't seem natural to me that Acme does not allow graphical programs in it's windows. -- Ethan Grammatikidis Those who are slower at parsing information must necessarily be faster at problem-solving.
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
Oberon takes advantage of a structured text representation where both the interpretation and graphic representation of particular elements is provided by Oberon modules. One demonstration had a little animated cartoon character that could be cut and pasted into another frame, where it continued to move. Acme exploits one chunk of identical text being the same as any other, given particular meaning by the button used to select it and its frame or tag context (the context including a program sitting behind the frame). It's probably relatively easy to give over Acme frames to a program that draws, but is there a good way of providing something more than that, giving more of the `structural support' that Acme provides to text-oriented applications? Is it time to consider a possible role for structured text along Oberon lines? One of the reasons for porting Acme to Inferno originally was to try to explore those things in a slightly more flexible environment, but it didn't happen, partly for lack of time.
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
I also take issue with the statement Acme is a text editor, that never sounds right, no more than describing Emacs as a text editor. It's natural to use Acme as a text editor and it provides many more text-editing facilities than Rio does, but it is also natural to use it as a file manager, shell window provider, email client, etc, etc. It provides more than Rio and it does it all with tiling windows and without menus, but that's just style. I always thought of using Acme as 'The' UI for Plan 9, much in the Oberon way. I'm not a techie, but I use Plan 9 since 2000, or so, as my main OS. I would *way* love having graphics in Acme, asi it IS a great UI, IMHO. Peter A. Cejchan, aka ++pac. winmail.dat
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
On Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:32:09 +0200 c...@gli.cas.cz wrote: I also take issue with the statement Acme is a text editor, that never sounds right, no more than describing Emacs as a text editor. It's natural to use Acme as a text editor and it provides many more text-editing facilities than Rio does, but it is also natural to use it as a file manager, shell window provider, email client, etc, etc. It provides more than Rio and it does it all with tiling windows and without menus, but that's just style. I always thought of using Acme as 'The' UI for Plan 9, much in the Oberon way. I'm not a techie, but I use Plan 9 since 2000, or so, as my main OS. I would *way* love having graphics in Acme, asi it IS a great UI, IMHO. As-is it's actually not a great UI for me, but perhaps with some small changes it could be. I'm still thinking those changes over. -- Ethan Grammatikidis Those who are slower at parsing information must necessarily be faster at problem-solving.
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 8:44 AM, Ethan Grammatikidiseeke...@fastmail.fm wrote: On Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:32:09 +0200 c...@gli.cas.cz wrote: I also take issue with the statement Acme is a text editor, that never sounds right, no more than describing Emacs as a text editor. It's natural to use Acme as a text editor and it provides many more text-editing facilities than Rio does, but it is also natural to use it as a file manager, shell window provider, email client, etc, etc. It provides more than Rio and it does it all with tiling windows and without menus, but that's just style. I always thought of using Acme as 'The' UI for Plan 9, much in the Oberon way. I'm not a techie, but I use Plan 9 since 2000, or so, as my main OS. I would *way* love having graphics in Acme, asi it IS a great UI, IMHO. As-is it's actually not a great UI for me, but perhaps with some small changes it could be. I'm still thinking those changes over. Acme is the worst editor/environment, except for all the others. Sometimes it seems cluttered and confusing, but then I realize that's because it has more files open than I would even try on emacs, merely because switching around between emacs buffers is slower and less convenient. Speaking of which, I recently discovered that emacs (on X, at least) is now capable of running a terminal which can in turn run vi or console-mode emacs. OT but madness. Now I want to run sam in acme. Eric and myself, and I think maybe Ron, are using acme and acme-sac to interact with a BlueGene/P system. I write code in acme, then use a guide file to run the various scripts I need to connect to the frontend node and launch jobs, then use win to telnet into the individual nodes and run tests. The real advantage comes from the Local command and the way windows are managed/output is handled. I'd really like to see acme get support for graphical programs, although right now I'm content enough as things stand. John -- I've tried programming Ruby on Rails, following TechCrunch in my RSS reader, and drinking absinthe. It doesn't work. I'm going back to C, Hunter S. Thompson, and cheap whiskey. -- Ted Dziuba
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
Eric and myself, and I think maybe Ron, are using acme and acme-sac to interact with a BlueGene/P system. Not as glamorous, but an alternative senario - I use sam and rio to write embedded and windows code. I edit the code with sam, but I do my best not to ever access the seperate rio snarf buffer. I keep the commands or scripts I need to test the code in rio's snarf, when I am ready to try things I just click the rio window and Button 2 to execute send. -Steve
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
This is funny: O/live supports both images and text. *but* It's been months ago that I do not use it any longer to display images but only for text. That way I may have more screen surface for text. Would the same happen to acme? Or perhaps it's me. On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 7:00 PM, John Florenslawmas...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 8:44 AM, Ethan Grammatikidiseeke...@fastmail.fm wrote: On Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:32:09 +0200 c...@gli.cas.cz wrote: I also take issue with the statement Acme is a text editor, that never sounds right, no more than describing Emacs as a text editor. It's natural to use Acme as a text editor and it provides many more text-editing facilities than Rio does, but it is also natural to use it as a file manager, shell window provider, email client, etc, etc. It provides more than Rio and it does it all with tiling windows and without menus, but that's just style. I always thought of using Acme as 'The' UI for Plan 9, much in the Oberon way. I'm not a techie, but I use Plan 9 since 2000, or so, as my main OS. I would *way* love having graphics in Acme, asi it IS a great UI, IMHO. As-is it's actually not a great UI for me, but perhaps with some small changes it could be. I'm still thinking those changes over. Acme is the worst editor/environment, except for all the others. Sometimes it seems cluttered and confusing, but then I realize that's because it has more files open than I would even try on emacs, merely because switching around between emacs buffers is slower and less convenient. Speaking of which, I recently discovered that emacs (on X, at least) is now capable of running a terminal which can in turn run vi or console-mode emacs. OT but madness. Now I want to run sam in acme. Eric and myself, and I think maybe Ron, are using acme and acme-sac to interact with a BlueGene/P system. I write code in acme, then use a guide file to run the various scripts I need to connect to the frontend node and launch jobs, then use win to telnet into the individual nodes and run tests. The real advantage comes from the Local command and the way windows are managed/output is handled. I'd really like to see acme get support for graphical programs, although right now I'm content enough as things stand. John -- I've tried programming Ruby on Rails, following TechCrunch in my RSS reader, and drinking absinthe. It doesn't work. I'm going back to C, Hunter S. Thompson, and cheap whiskey. -- Ted Dziuba
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 11:26 AM, Steve Simon st...@quintile.net wrote:
Eric and myself, and I think maybe Ron, are using acme and acme-sac to
interact with a BlueGene/P system.
Not as glamorous, but an alternative senario - I use sam and rio
to write embedded and windows code.
I edit the code with sam, but I do my best not to ever access
the seperate rio snarf buffer.
I keep the commands or scripts I need to test the code in rio's
snarf, when I am ready to try things I just click the rio window
and Button 2 to execute send.
-Steve
I use plan 9 port acme fairly regularly, when I get tired of weird Emacsisms
that get in my way rather than helping me.
Just yesterday I was writing Common Lisp code, with an SBCL REPL in the
bottom window and an editor of the lisp code in the upper window, for
testing out an SNMP agent I wrote for another platform (Common Lisp for the
test harness seems like it's been a great choice so far... I just love
defmacro)
It's really nice to quickly cut and paste an expression from the editor to
the REPL to test ideas, or vice versa... fight with S-expressions at the
REPL, then cobble the program together by pasting functional parts together.
I'll probably start writing my Haskell that way, but Haskell has this damned
layout style that I seem to default to that's like Python and gets most
annoying when spacing isn't just so. I guess I'll switch to the { ;}
style that it also supports. Emacs is sadly far better with the layout
style than acme seems like it could be, as there's some choices to the
indentation that mean different things that one can cycle through, and
Emacs' mode gets this right.
Again, the layout mode seems to be a bug in Haskell not a feature, but
that's not a popular belief in that community.
Dave
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 11:59 AM, David Leimbachleim...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 11:26 AM, Steve Simon st...@quintile.net wrote: Eric and myself, and I think maybe Ron, are using acme and acme-sac to interact with a BlueGene/P system. Not as glamorous, but an alternative senario - I use sam and rio to write embedded and windows code. I edit the code with sam, but I do my best not to ever access the seperate rio snarf buffer. I keep the commands or scripts I need to test the code in rio's snarf, when I am ready to try things I just click the rio window and Button 2 to execute send. -Steve I use plan 9 port acme fairly regularly, when I get tired of weird Emacsisms that get in my way rather than helping me. Emacs is great for writing Lisp. Now, if only I could find the correct .emacs invocation to make the tab key insert a tab character in C mode, rather than a bunch of spaces the way His Holy Lunacy RMS desires. If I wanted spaces instead of tabs, I'd type them! John -- I've tried programming Ruby on Rails, following TechCrunch in my RSS reader, and drinking absinthe. It doesn't work. I'm going back to C, Hunter S. Thompson, and cheap whiskey. -- Ted Dziuba
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 12:07 PM, John Floren slawmas...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 11:59 AM, David Leimbachleim...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 11:26 AM, Steve Simon st...@quintile.net wrote: Eric and myself, and I think maybe Ron, are using acme and acme-sac to interact with a BlueGene/P system. Not as glamorous, but an alternative senario - I use sam and rio to write embedded and windows code. I edit the code with sam, but I do my best not to ever access the seperate rio snarf buffer. I keep the commands or scripts I need to test the code in rio's snarf, when I am ready to try things I just click the rio window and Button 2 to execute send. -Steve I use plan 9 port acme fairly regularly, when I get tired of weird Emacsisms that get in my way rather than helping me. Emacs is great for writing Lisp. Now, if only I could find the correct .emacs invocation to make the tab key insert a tab character in C mode, rather than a bunch of spaces the way His Holy Lunacy RMS desires. If I wanted spaces instead of tabs, I'd type them! And yet since every damned editor interprets a tab differently, I'd almost with the tab key away completely :-) I guess we just make everyone use Acme and move on :-). Dave John -- I've tried programming Ruby on Rails, following TechCrunch in my RSS reader, and drinking absinthe. It doesn't work. I'm going back to C, Hunter S. Thompson, and cheap whiskey. -- Ted Dziuba
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
It's a lot easier to see (and not have in the first place) incorrect scope and continuation with whitespace than with braces or parentheses. do you have a reference for this claim? - erik
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
Again, the layout mode seems to be a bug in Haskell not a feature, but that's not a popular belief in that community. It's only as complex as the various levels of scope you end up needing in your program. Meaningful whitespace enforces a clean, readable, delimiter-free style, making programs look more like each other. It's a lot easier to see (and not have in the first place) incorrect scope and continuation with whitespace than with braces or parentheses. Acme only has two indentation rules (nothing, or same as the existing line), so Emacs' constant re-parsing of the file to determine the correct indentation level is always going to be more correct. This kind of programming support seems akin to me to colorful syntax highlighting: great if you need it, distracting once you really get good with a language. In the case of indenting, I might not actually code the next line right away, but auto-indent to just the right place for it means I have to go out of my way more often to get the cursor to where I actually want it. Dave Jason Catena
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
It's a lot easier to see (and not have in the first place) incorrect scope and continuation with whitespace than with braces or parentheses. i read this as it's a lot easier to see incorrect variations in the tempo of a mucal piece with white noise than with a metronome do you have a reference for this claim? and here i imagined the crazy-haired mad scientist saying your whitespace is not so white now, is it?! muahahahaha then i took my meds.
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
2009/7/15 erik quanstrom quans...@coraid.com: It's a lot easier to see (and not have in the first place) incorrect scope and continuation with whitespace than with braces or parentheses. do you have a reference for this claim? Without turning this into a holy war, I really always see these issues as a matter of personal preference. This is why editors are so bloated and languages have weird conventions. On that note, my personal experience has found it to be a lot easier to find and correct scope issues in Python than it has to find missing braces or semicolons in other languages, sometimes even with matching enabled. This usually is the case for awful spaghetti-ish code. But I digress. --dho
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
Devon's anecdote is along the lines of my position. I'm sure there's a paper somewhere that counts parenthesis versus whitespace errors, but I haven't yet read it. I have programmed Lisp and Haskell (at two extremes), and from this experience at least much prefer whitespace to parentheses. In addition, I rely on design theory (esp. Tufte et al on his web site) that reducing clutter aids comprehension, and delimiters very much seem clutter to me. Jason Catena
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
http://9fans.net/archive/2008/05/6 On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 10:29 PM, Jason Catenajason.cat...@gmail.com wrote: Devon's anecdote is along the lines of my position. I'm sure there's a paper somewhere that counts parenthesis versus whitespace errors, but I haven't yet read it. I have programmed Lisp and Haskell (at two extremes), and from this experience at least much prefer whitespace to parentheses. In addition, I rely on design theory (esp. Tufte et al on his web site) that reducing clutter aids comprehension, and delimiters very much seem clutter to me. Jason Catena
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
On that note, my personal experience has found it to be a lot easier to find and correct scope issues in Python than it has to find missing braces or semicolons in other languages, sometimes even with matching enabled. This usually is the case for awful spaghetti-ish code. I find Python's whitespace rules annoying, but I can live with them. Where the whitespace flow control always screws me is when I'm working on a particular chunk of code using different editors that have different semantics for interpreting HT. You have to remember if the editor of the moment interprets HT as: 1) HT passed through, displays to next col%8 2) HT passed through, displays to next col%user_defined_tabstop setting 3) As for (1) and (2), but HT also expanded to corresponding n*SP to match display interpretation. As soon as you mix 8 and non-8 tabstop rails, any remnants of sanity exit stage left. Because of this I far-too-often find myself running acme-edited code through [un]expand to ensure sane tab behaviour. (Not acme's falut per se -- it's just the editor I most commonly use that does non-8 tabstops by default.) --lyndon
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 1:42 PM, Noah Evans noah.ev...@gmail.com wrote:
http://9fans.net/archive/2008/05/6
Haskell *will* tell you errors that don't make any sense (at least GHC
errors) when you don't have things like this done properly
do x - foo
y - bar
the y - bar must be directly under the x on the previous line or it's a
syntax error, and the error you get from GHC is the last statement of a do
construct must be an expression
not
dude, you suck at indenting code, and should have used Emacs to keep track
of it, because nothing else does the job right.
Luckilly Haskell will let you ignore layout and do the following:
do { x - foo
; y - bar }
However, I don't see enough of this style code to feel comfortable writing
anything I'd plan to share with anyone and expect them to feel ok reading
it.
Dave
http://9fans.net/archive/2008/05/6
On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 10:29 PM, Jason Catenajason.cat...@gmail.com
wrote:
Devon's anecdote is along the lines of my position. I'm sure there's
a paper somewhere that counts parenthesis versus whitespace errors,
but I haven't yet read it. I have programmed Lisp and Haskell (at two
extremes), and from this experience at least much prefer whitespace to
parentheses. In addition, I rely on design theory (esp. Tufte et al
on his web site) that reducing clutter aids comprehension, and
delimiters very much seem clutter to me.
Jason Catena
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
Emacs is great for writing Lisp. Now, if only I could find the correct .emacs invocation to make the tab key insert a tab character in C mode, rather than a bunch of spaces the way His Holy Lunacy RMS desires. If I wanted spaces instead of tabs, I'd type them! OT for the list, but this is trivial in emacs for several years now, and RMS has nothing to do with the special code for C mode (which is called CC-mode, and supports a bevy of languages, and is complicated enough that it can probably boot minix on it's own by now). *Chad
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
acme is more than a buffer with text to edit, it also has the filesystem interface that allows programs to be written specifically for it (Mail, Wiki, etc). I never thought that doing graphics in acme was a need, as most of the time I'm just editing text and having some graphical up there would take space that I can really use to list a directory, another source file, or whatever. I also don't think that you'll have to emulate rio's behavior as you can run most of the graphical programs without rio, that's the beauty of rio, it gives almost the same interface as it gets from the kernel. in any case, years ago I gave it a try, but I after a day of hacking I lost my interest, I know some people still want this functionality, so if you are up to the challenge go for it. I have a tgz on mordor which can run draw apps on acme, but it's not functional at all, so if you're interested let me know http://www.tip9ug.jp/who/fgb/acme.png On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 9:22 AM, Ethan Grammatikidiseeke...@fastmail.fm wrote: On Wed, 15 Jul 2009 09:25:51 GMT Paul Donnelly paul-donne...@sbcglobal.net wrote: jason.cat...@gmail.com (Jason Catena) writes: I've been wondering for years now why Acme (and Wily, which I used first) only display text files. It seems to me that the content of an Acme window could be anything: a picture, a postscript or PDF file, a star chart, a web page. Keeping with the spirit of small parts brought together, Acme could outsource the displaying of the content to another program, place its output in the Acme window, and operate on it by sending commands from the tag to the rendering program. Hi, I don't know anything about anything, but it seems to me that it's more productive to look at the question the other way around: why not modify Rio to tile windows like Acme does? Acme is a text editor, so it's no surprise that it handles text only. You may be thinking too monolithically. The draw device multiplexes itself so it shouldn't take much coding for acme to provide draw in addition to the other files it provides in /mnt/wsys. Mouse is just as important as draw and will need a little more code. Not only would acme need to multiplex it but it would need to emulate rio's behaviour. To quote Rio's man page: Opening it turns off scrolling, editing, and rio-supplied menus in the associated window. That isn't 100% true, scrolling isn't actually disabled but is not naturally accessible and looks very messy when you force it. What is true is that rio ceases to interpret keys specially other than backspace and return (curiously), and mouse events on the window are blindly sent to the application. It still doesn't sound like a lot of code, but may take some careful thought. Maybe that's a summary of Plan 9 methodology. :) I also take issue with the statement Acme is a text editor, that never sounds right, no more than describing Emacs as a text editor. It's natural to use Acme as a text editor and it provides many more text-editing facilities than Rio does, but it is also natural to use it as a file manager, shell window provider, email client, etc, etc. It provides more than Rio and it does it all with tiling windows and without menus, but that's just style. Rio windows could seriously use a search function and one or two other text-editor facilities wouldn't go amiss. It doesn't seem natural to me that Acme does not allow graphical programs in it's windows. -- Ethan Grammatikidis Those who are slower at parsing information must necessarily be faster at problem-solving. -- Federico G. Benavento
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
On Wed, 15 Jul 2009 22:42:20 +0200 Noah Evans noah.ev...@gmail.com wrote: http://9fans.net/archive/2008/05/6 Good to see this brought up. Whitespace may be the most comfortably readable means of indicating flow, but it's fragile. Better, IMHO, is delimiters with plenty of space around them, but even then they do intrude. Currently I like Q where parentheses can be used if necessary but a couple of syntactic tricks are used to keep them to the minimum and whitespace has some meaning but (IIRC) not over-much. I find the best thing to do with languages with delimeters is to run code through a code formatter often. I'm using Gnu indent for C code (especially valuable when dealing with Gnu C :) ), is there a similar tool for Plan 9? On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 10:29 PM, Jason Catenajason.cat...@gmail.com wrote: Devon's anecdote is along the lines of my position. I'm sure there's a paper somewhere that counts parenthesis versus whitespace errors, but I haven't yet read it. I have programmed Lisp and Haskell (at two extremes), and from this experience at least much prefer whitespace to parentheses. In addition, I rely on design theory (esp. Tufte et al on his web site) that reducing clutter aids comprehension, and delimiters very much seem clutter to me. Jason Catena -- Ethan Grammatikidis Those who are slower at parsing information must necessarily be faster at problem-solving.
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 1:58 PM, Chad Brownyand...@mit.edu wrote: Emacs is great for writing Lisp. Now, if only I could find the correct .emacs invocation to make the tab key insert a tab character in C mode, rather than a bunch of spaces the way His Holy Lunacy RMS desires. If I wanted spaces instead of tabs, I'd type them! OT for the list, but this is trivial in emacs for several years now, and RMS has nothing to do with the special code for C mode (which is called CC-mode, and supports a bevy of languages, and is complicated enough that it can probably boot minix on it's own by now). *Chad In the interests of not slandering Emacs excessively, I'd like to state that I seem to have figured out my .emacs file to a point where hitting a tab inserts a tab. That will be all. John -- I've tried programming Ruby on Rails, following TechCrunch in my RSS reader, and drinking absinthe. It doesn't work. I'm going back to C, Hunter S. Thompson, and cheap whiskey. -- Ted Dziuba
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
fgb, your ability to hack is mighty indeed :-) On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 2:00 PM, Federico G. Benavento benave...@gmail.comwrote: acme is more than a buffer with text to edit, it also has the filesystem interface that allows programs to be written specifically for it (Mail, Wiki, etc). I never thought that doing graphics in acme was a need, as most of the time I'm just editing text and having some graphical up there would take space that I can really use to list a directory, another source file, or whatever. I also don't think that you'll have to emulate rio's behavior as you can run most of the graphical programs without rio, that's the beauty of rio, it gives almost the same interface as it gets from the kernel. in any case, years ago I gave it a try, but I after a day of hacking I lost my interest, I know some people still want this functionality, so if you are up to the challenge go for it. I have a tgz on mordor which can run draw apps on acme, but it's not functional at all, so if you're interested let me know http://www.tip9ug.jp/who/fgb/acme.png On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 9:22 AM, Ethan Grammatikidiseeke...@fastmail.fm wrote: On Wed, 15 Jul 2009 09:25:51 GMT Paul Donnelly paul-donne...@sbcglobal.net wrote: jason.cat...@gmail.com (Jason Catena) writes: I've been wondering for years now why Acme (and Wily, which I used first) only display text files. It seems to me that the content of an Acme window could be anything: a picture, a postscript or PDF file, a star chart, a web page. Keeping with the spirit of small parts brought together, Acme could outsource the displaying of the content to another program, place its output in the Acme window, and operate on it by sending commands from the tag to the rendering program. Hi, I don't know anything about anything, but it seems to me that it's more productive to look at the question the other way around: why not modify Rio to tile windows like Acme does? Acme is a text editor, so it's no surprise that it handles text only. You may be thinking too monolithically. The draw device multiplexes itself so it shouldn't take much coding for acme to provide draw in addition to the other files it provides in /mnt/wsys. Mouse is just as important as draw and will need a little more code. Not only would acme need to multiplex it but it would need to emulate rio's behaviour. To quote Rio's man page: Opening it turns off scrolling, editing, and rio-supplied menus in the associated window. That isn't 100% true, scrolling isn't actually disabled but is not naturally accessible and looks very messy when you force it. What is true is that rio ceases to interpret keys specially other than backspace and return (curiously), and mouse events on the window are blindly sent to the application. It still doesn't sound like a lot of code, but may take some careful thought. Maybe that's a summary of Plan 9 methodology. :) I also take issue with the statement Acme is a text editor, that never sounds right, no more than describing Emacs as a text editor. It's natural to use Acme as a text editor and it provides many more text-editing facilities than Rio does, but it is also natural to use it as a file manager, shell window provider, email client, etc, etc. It provides more than Rio and it does it all with tiling windows and without menus, but that's just style. Rio windows could seriously use a search function and one or two other text-editor facilities wouldn't go amiss. It doesn't seem natural to me that Acme does not allow graphical programs in it's windows. -- Ethan Grammatikidis Those who are slower at parsing information must necessarily be faster at problem-solving. -- Federico G. Benavento
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
I find the best thing to do with languages with delimeters is to run code through a code formatter often. I'm using Gnu indent for C code (especially valuable when dealing with Gnu C :) ), is there a similar tool for Plan 9? i find that formatting code well to begin with works best. but when faced with ugly code, cb(1) is helpful. steve has something a bit more aggressive in his contrib area. - erik
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
On Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:51:02 -0700
David Leimbach leim...@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 1:42 PM, Noah Evans noah.ev...@gmail.com wrote:
http://9fans.net/archive/2008/05/6
Haskell *will* tell you errors that don't make any sense (at least GHC
errors) when you don't have things like this done properly
The linked post pointed out there are times when barely-visible errors are not
caught and go on to cause big problems. That's pretty nasty.
do x - foo
y - bar
the y - bar must be directly under the x on the previous line or it's a
syntax error, and the error you get from GHC is the last statement of a do
construct must be an expression
Huh, so this Haskell syntax actually prevents you from indenting something that
would be indented in any other language. Okay...
Luckilly Haskell will let you ignore layout and do the following:
do { x - foo
; y - bar }
However, I don't see enough of this style code to feel comfortable writing
anything I'd plan to share with anyone and expect them to feel ok reading
it.
It sure doesn't look comfortable to me. Strange semicolon placement for one
thing. Do the braces have to be on the same lines as the code like that? Could
it be written like this?:
do
{
x - foo;
y - bar
}
That's readable to my eyes, but looks like it may be quite different to the
first form.
--
Ethan Grammatikidis
Those who are slower at parsing information must
necessarily be faster at problem-solving.
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
On Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:12:58 -0400 erik quanstrom quans...@coraid.com wrote: I find the best thing to do with languages with delimeters is to run code through a code formatter often. I'm using Gnu indent for C code (especially valuable when dealing with Gnu C :) ), is there a similar tool for Plan 9? i find that formatting code well to begin with works best. but when faced with ugly code, cb(1) is helpful. steve has something a bit more aggressive in his contrib area. Cheers, I'll try cb -- Ethan Grammatikidis Those who are slower at parsing information must necessarily be faster at problem-solving.
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
Real World Haskell ch4 pp71-72 do x - foo y - bar the y - bar must be directly under the x on the previous line or it's a syntax error, and the error you get from GHC is the last statement of a do construct must be an expression Huh, so this Haskell syntax actually prevents you from indenting something that would be indented in any other language. Okay... I didn't read it like this. The x and y must be lined up because they are both part of the same set of do-statements. If the y line was a standalone statement, then it could be indented as shown in this code segment. But in that case there's no need for a do, since the point of do is to order statements in sequential time. the following is a complete Haskell program, using do, which passes through its input file to an output file. The specifies code lines, other lines are considered comments. (I hope gmail preserves the spacing.) Real World Haskell ch4 pp71-72 import System.Environment (getArgs) interactWith function inputFile outputFile = do input - readFile inputFile writeFile outputFile (function input) main = mainWith myFunction where mainWith function = do args - getArgs case args of [input,output] - interactWith function input output _ - putStrLn error: need exactly two arguments Replace id with any function (of the same type) to process the data. myFunction = id
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
I always intended to do something about that but never got around to it. Other things took precedence. In any case I doubt it could ever work as well in Acme as it does in Oberon. -rob
Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?
On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 9:36 PM, Rob Pike robp...@gmail.com wrote: I always intended to do something about that but never got around to it. Other things took precedence. In any case I doubt it could ever work as well in Acme as it does in Oberon. -rob Rio works nicely though, and thanks for that! :-)
