Thanks for that! I've long wondered what made Acme special, and never had the patience to read through Pike's paper.
TL;DW (my notes as I'm watching it for people who prefer text): Acme includes its own tiling window management for your open files/buffers. It is strongly mouse driven, where clicking or highlighting regions with the different buttons perform different actions. For example: highlight text with button 1, then with that held down clicking button 2 cuts that text. This mouse button combination/sequence is a "chord".
More powerful is the "execute" action (button 2) on various text. executing the word "cut" does that. You can execute external programs this way, with the output appearing in a new buffer. You can of course pipe or redirect selected text to/from external programs. You can add frequently used commands to the "menu bar" ("tag") by typing them there.
With the "load" action (button 3), you can load files by name and added references (such as open file at given regexp point and highlight to another point). This allows easy and native opening of filenames given by compiler errors.
Acme supports UTF-8 Unicode natively (aside: UTF-8 was invented for Plan9 where Acme comes from [1]).
Acme is an IDE that integrates external tools at the text level. As a Plan9 product, it exposes itself to other tools as a file system (using FUSE on Linux). Using this, the author created a simple presentation system used to demonstrate this very video.
An external script can read window events by reading a file in the file-system exposed by Acme. This can be used to implement a shell within Acme, or various things like mail readers, music players...
The button 3 (load) action can be used to easily open manpages and open related manpages by just highlighting "acme(1)", or directly view a given Mercurial commit by loading its hash, or even a UPS shipment by loading its tracking number. Things can be opened in external programs, and all of this is managed by a "plumber" program that has rules.
As a programming environment, you can run some 'watch' program on a work-in-progress buffer to (say) compile and run a program as you save.
TL;DR: Acme is a flexible editor that can perform programmable actions based on highlighted text and merge that into buffers, and exposes a filesystem-like interface for other programs to use.
PS: holy shit, I only just noticed that presentation was by Russ Cox.
And for a separate personal opinion: Acme indeed looks very very powerful, but I've gone too far down the keyboard-only path to ever accept its mouse-driven paradigm. Emacs (my poison of choice) has a bit of the same "interact with external programs through buffers" idea, though nothing as simple and powerful as Acme.
TL;DW (my notes as I'm watching it for people who prefer text): Acme includes its own tiling window management for your open files/buffers. It is strongly mouse driven, where clicking or highlighting regions with the different buttons perform different actions. For example: highlight text with button 1, then with that held down clicking button 2 cuts that text. This mouse button combination/sequence is a "chord".
More powerful is the "execute" action (button 2) on various text. executing the word "cut" does that. You can execute external programs this way, with the output appearing in a new buffer. You can of course pipe or redirect selected text to/from external programs. You can add frequently used commands to the "menu bar" ("tag") by typing them there.
With the "load" action (button 3), you can load files by name and added references (such as open file at given regexp point and highlight to another point). This allows easy and native opening of filenames given by compiler errors.
Acme supports UTF-8 Unicode natively (aside: UTF-8 was invented for Plan9 where Acme comes from [1]).
Acme is an IDE that integrates external tools at the text level. As a Plan9 product, it exposes itself to other tools as a file system (using FUSE on Linux). Using this, the author created a simple presentation system used to demonstrate this very video.
An external script can read window events by reading a file in the file-system exposed by Acme. This can be used to implement a shell within Acme, or various things like mail readers, music players...
The button 3 (load) action can be used to easily open manpages and open related manpages by just highlighting "acme(1)", or directly view a given Mercurial commit by loading its hash, or even a UPS shipment by loading its tracking number. Things can be opened in external programs, and all of this is managed by a "plumber" program that has rules.
As a programming environment, you can run some 'watch' program on a work-in-progress buffer to (say) compile and run a program as you save.
TL;DR: Acme is a flexible editor that can perform programmable actions based on highlighted text and merge that into buffers, and exposes a filesystem-like interface for other programs to use.
PS: holy shit, I only just noticed that presentation was by Russ Cox.
[1] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt