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| Acme: A User Interface For Programmers |
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posted by Editor on Friday December 07, @09:50AM
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Acme is a hybrid of window system, shell, and editor that was developed by Rob Pike, an engineer at Bell Labs who wrote The Unix Programming Environment with Brian Kernighan. Acme's goal is to give text-oriented applications a clean, expressive, and consistent style of interaction. While traditional window systems offer libraries of pre-defined operations such as pop-up menus and buttons to promote a consistent user interface among the clients, Acme instead provides its clients with a fixed user interface and simple conventions to encourage its uniform use. Acme is in part a file server that exports device-like files that may be manipulated to access and control the contents of its windows, and clients access Acme's facilities through a file system interface. Acme attaches distinct functions to the three mouse buttons: the left selects text; the middle executes textual commands; and the right combines context search and file opening functions to integrate the various applications and files in the system. Acme is available in both the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems, and it is written in Alef, a concurrent object-oriented language syntactically similar to C.
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This discussion has been archived.
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by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 08, @08:13PM EST (#1)
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by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 09, @09:52PM EST (#2)
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I think we need to go back in time to good ol' twm from the X window system. Or BeOS. Even now (from using my Mom's iMac) Macs have 'View as Popup Window', which is a cool feature that puts a window in a tab at the bottom of the screen. I believe we should head towards the 'Workspaces, shelves and Tablets' metaphor. I call a tablet a window component, like an inbox, document window, etc. that can be switched to with it's tab. For example:
http://www.geocities.com/mike_ekim/projects/new-in terface/new-workspace.jpg
http://www.geocities.com/mike_ekim/
To me, the perfect system would have a system menubar at the top, a doc on the right or left, and a shelf and tab layout mechanism. I hate moving windows around trying to line them up with others. I also believe in descibing UI layouts in more generic form so that it can be viewed on a desktop or a PDA. Tabs become dropdown menus, window splits (inbox folder/preview message, etc.) become buttons, etc. Without any extra work by the programmer. If I have time I will one day code it. Maybee in DHTML to start with and prototype. Such as:
http://www.geocities.com/mike_ekim/projects/new-in terface/popup-applet.html
Mike
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by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 26, @10:22AM EST (#4)
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If you look at www.cs.yorku.ca/~oz/wily/ you can find the UNIX version of wily.
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