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Re:New year, same old plans by mortdeus on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @04:51AM (#19561831)
One thing that bothers me about new code editors/IDEs is that their developers really don't do a good enough job researching and deriving inspiration from the editors that already exist.

For example, I have yet to find any modern editor that draws inspiration from the brilliantly designed ideas used in Plan 9's 'sam' and 'acme' editors.

For example structured regexps, 3 button mouse chording, and the 'plumb' feature thats basically a context-aware, smarter version of a unix pipe between two executables.

I mean i can go on and on but another thing that i find absolutely annoying about newer editors is that they all use Webkit as the base of their apps core foundation.

This makes it irritating to consider trying to make changes to the code that I believe would overall improve the editor and make it more useful. (at least as far as im concerned)

I can literally make a list a mile long of things I like in other editors and wish i could see condensed into one ultimate code editor to supplant all code editors that had come before.

Re:New year, same old plans by arethuza on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @05:34AM (#19561999)
Given the amount of time that people spend using editors, you think it would be worth some kind of wide ranging academic review article summarising the history of this area.

Does such a thing exist?

Re:New year, same old plans by ianai on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @07:27AM (#19562473)
Not academic, but vim has some serious range. I really wish more apps made an effort to be mouse free.

But I also wish plan9 got more awareness. Unix pipes are so useful that it’s a shame the plan9 paradigms have largely been ignored or reinvented.

Re:New year, same old plans by threatofrain on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @10:49AM (#19563775)
Typing only on the keyboard can be very nice for posture, but I feel that Vim users may think slightly differently if people invented a better keyboard with a pointer device attached.

Then you wouldn't be "taking your hands off the keyboard", you'd just be engaging in a different motion.

Re:New year, same old plans by mst on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @12:00PM (#19564451)
That's how I feel when using a keyboard with an integrated trackpoint.

Not everybody agrees, of course.

Re:New year, same old plans by threatofrain on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @12:19PM (#19564637)
What keyboards have worked out for you?
Re:New year, same old plans by css on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @12:22PM (#19564669)
Re:New year, same old plans by mst on Thursday April 04, 2019 @11:23AM (#19573380)
Thinkpad external keyboards, both USB and bluetooth - currently typing on one of the former, with one of the latter in my jacket pocket for use with my android tablet.
Re:New year, same old plans by wasdfff on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @12:56PM (#19564976)
I’m suprised no one tried an eye tracking cursor
Re:New year, same old plans by anoncake on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @03:14PM (#19566309)
I dont think eye tracking is precise enough for that.
Re:New year, same old plans by minieggs on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @11:50AM (#19564359)
Similar to the "KeyMouse" keyboard?
Re:New year, same old plans by majewsky on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @07:31AM (#19562492)
Can you recommend a place where I can read about these "plan9 paradigms"? I have an interest in it from a design perspective, but don't quite have time to read the source code.
Re:New year, same old plans by glangdale on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @08:30AM (#19562754)
The original paper on acme is here: http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/acme/

Acme was different to the 'sam' editor and most other Plan 9 programs up to that point (aside from its predecessor, "help", a similar system that was replaced by acme).

Re:New year, same old plans by ianai on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @07:42AM (#19562536)
Look up a YouTube of somebody using it and discussing its features. Basically you could mount computational resources like cpus/ram/network/etc from an external resource server. It also had a graphical equivalent to the Unix pipe between applications.
Re:New year, same old plans by dmnd on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @12:36PM (#19564796)
I feel like your point was missed in the sibling comment. An academic review of editor history would be fascinating, and if it thorough enough might even inspire editor authors to adjust their philosophy.
Re:New year, same old plans by arethuza on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @12:41PM (#19564843)
I guess if it was thorough enough and tried to synthesise some kind of framework for analysing these things there might even be a PhD in it for someone?
Re:New year, same old plans by pjmlp on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @08:36AM (#19562789)
Those brilliantly designed ideas used in Plan 9's 'sam' and 'acme' editors were taken from how Mesa XDE, Mesa/Cedar and Oberon used to work across the whole OS, not just the text editor.

So a proof that even that point needs better research. :)

Since we are on a Lisp thread, same applies to those that just bother with Emacs, eventually SLIME, withouth ever spending one second with actual Common Lisp IDEs.

Re:New year, same old plans by hollerith on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @08:41AM (#19562809)
'sam' is older than Oberon :)
Re:New year, same old plans by pjmlp on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @08:46AM (#19562848)
"... Mesa XDE, Mesa/Cedar..."
Re:New year, same old plans by hollerith on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @09:03AM (#19562930)
OK. I was too quick to correct you and did not spend enough time searching for charitable interpretations of your words.
Re:New year, same old plans by pjmlp on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @09:10AM (#19562987)
More info here.

"The Mesa Programming Environment"

http://www.digibarn.com/friends/curbow/star/XDEPaper.pdf

"The Cedar Programming Environment: A Midterm Report and Examination "

http://worrydream.com/refs/Teitelman%20-%20The%20Cedar%20Pro...

Re:New year, same old plans by roi on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @08:34AM (#19562774)
The text editor Vis (https://github.com/martanne/vis, previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15710533, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11445389) is explicitly inspired by sam's structural regular expressions.
Re:New year, same old plans by usermac on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @06:01AM (#19562106)
I had no idea what you were talking about but I found the video and it reminded me of "Demo" from 1968 believe https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=plan9+acme&&view=detail...
Re:New year, same old plans by codetrotter on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @02:19PM (#19565809)
Timestamp in video says 2002.
Re:New year, same old plans by 0x445442 on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @09:21AM (#19563077)
Here's a discussion on Jeff Raskin's Canon Cat https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14650365

One of its strengths was discoverability. Jeff's son Aza iterated on a number of the ideas from the Cat with Enso and Ubiquity but those efforts were not specific to an editor.

Re:New year, same old plans by cpach on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @05:54AM (#19562083)
It’s been years since I first heard of sam and acme. Perhaps I should try them. Is it possible to run them in MacOS/Linux/Windows? Or perhaps a virtual machine?

BTW, does chording work well with mice where one of the ”three” buttons is the scrool wheel?

Re:New year, same old plans by vthriller on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @06:50AM (#19562298)
Clickable scroll wheel works fine, it is mapped to the same button.

I can't, however, imagine left+middle chord on modern laptops, there are not that many laptops (mostly ThinkPads as far as I can tell) that have three physical mouse buttons.

Re:New year, same old plans by mjl- on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @08:23AM (#19562724)
i'm (happily!) using acme on macos. works great, the option and cmd buttons act as modifiers for middle and left button (execute and search).
Re:New year, same old plans by pmarreck on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @03:26PM (#19566407)
Re:New year, same old plans by Koshkin on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @11:41AM (#19564272)
> 3 button mouse chording

This has never given me an impression of a good UX.

Re:New year, same old plans by copperx on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @11:43AM (#19564294)
Just because it's not common?
Re:New year, same old plans by jes5199 on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @11:57AM (#19564414)
chords aren’t discoverable. they’re like keyboard shortcuts but worse - at least keyboard shortcuts have a letter name that could be an initialism
Re:New year, same old plans by munificent on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @03:29PM (#19566433)
That's true, but with UX, there are sometimes trade-offs to make around discoverability and productivity.

A more discoverable UI may take a greater number of steps to perform. If the application is used rarely or briefly, that's a good trade-off. But if an application will be heavily used by a user who is incentivized to learn the tool, then their total productivity matters more since it amortizes over the lifetime of their use with the tool.

Text editors definitely fall into the "heavily used" bucket, so a good user experience might mean "you gotta read the manual, but once you do you can go 10x faster".

Re:New year, same old plans by accoil on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @03:53PM (#19566649)
Acme cords are very simple: http://acme.cat-v.org/mouse

They're basic verbs you use to interact with text; not a full command. E.g instead of executing "format document" from a menu, you select the document with the left mouse button, and then middle click on the word "format". This executes the "format" command on the selected text. Somewhat like running gg=G in vim.

Re:New year, same old plans by anoncake on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @03:15PM (#19566317)
Not everything has to be designed purely for discoverability.
Re:New year, same old plans by mamcx on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @10:28AM (#19563603)
> the 'plumb' feature

This is the first time I hear about this. What make it better? How I learn more?

Re:New year, same old plans by Koshkin on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @11:39AM (#19564247)
There isn't much to it. Windows, for example, implements plumbing as the ability for the user to double-click, in an Explorer window, on, say, a PDF file and have it opened automatically using the default PDF viewer; the command-line equivalent is the 'start' command.