ACME-CORP: Utilities and extension programs for the acme text editor

This repo is a collection of scripts, extension programs and helpers for use with the acme text editor from plan9. I highly recommend installing the wonderful plan9 from userspace port of plan9 software to unix, optionally using my fork for a few tweaks such as additional key bindings for acme and a suckless style config.h file for setting a custom color scheme and default fonts.

Each top level directory is a stand alone go binary that should be possible to run with a vanilla acme installation independently from one another. That said, the intention is to run all of these as a suite of programs that compliment one another.

Inspired by Suckless

I love the suckless programs. On my home machine I run dwm, st and dmenu and I have my own patched versions of all three that I tinker with from time to time. I'm pretty satisfied with my current setup: despite running on an old, cheap HP laptop I get pretty snappy performance and I'm yet to see any random crashes (other than while I'm actively tinkering of course).

With that in mind, acme-corp is written to be as simple as possible while still being readable. So, little to no magic hacks, comments and links around any of the more esoteric pieces of code (in particular the use of sam expressions to manipulate window content) and configuration by modifying the source. As much as I love writing parsers and command line utilities, it really is far easier to just pull simple things from environment variables and hard code the rest.

Installation

As far as I can tell, go get -ing this repo and running go install ./... in the root should be all you need to grab the utilities themselves. For the scripts, you will need to add them to your $PATH (I tend to conditionally add them when starting acme so that I don't clutter up my $PATH). Some of the scripts are simple triggers for the snooper so you will need to kick that off in order for them to do anything. I haven't provided any sort of install script for the dependencies as they tend to fluctuate a bit as I work on things. Make sure to read the source of anything you intend to run to see what it expects to be on your system.

Current utilities

For more in depth information, please see the individual README files in each directory and obviously the source code itself.

• dirtree

  • A directory viewer for acme. The built in support for navigating the filesystem can quickly get out of hand if you are jumping around directories a lot. This allows you to have a single window that acts as a file tree, allowing you to move the root when needed.

• gq

  • Mimic the Vim gq key sequence. Yes I know that fmt exists but I wanted to write something that did what I wanted out of the box. Essentially this is wrap lines to a column count (default 80) and preserve any common prefix that is found in order to give a language agnostic way to tidy up comment blocks.

• punt

  • Quickly open the current window in an external program. Originally intended for punting things over to Vim if I needed to do some more complicated editing that I can currently get my head around using sam commands. It can also send window content to GUI based programs (default is to expect that the program will run in a terminal) via the -g flag.

• snoop-acme

  • A local TCP server that tails all acme event streams and runs hooks such as auto formatting and linting (for known filetypes and tools) and quickly allowing programs to access the currently focused window. As far as I can tell, the latter is simply emitted on the event log rather than being a piece of state that you can pull from the acme virtual file system. My main reason for wanting to get at this is to drive things like the acme-fuzzy-window-search.sh script.