Let’s Try Acme: Ep. 1 - Hello, World

After my initial research, it’s time to give ol’ Acme a try. First things first - I needed to install Acme. Homebrew made that quite easy.

$ brew install acme

Then running it was just as easy.

$ acme

ACME - the ACME Crossassembler for Multiple Environments
  Copyright (C) 1998-2006 Marco Baye
This is ACME, release 0.91 ("Gargravarr"), 26 Mar 2006
  Platform independent version.
Current maintainer Krzysztof Dabrowski aka BruSH/ElysiuM
ACME comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details read the help file.
  This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under
  certain conditions; as outlined in the GNU General Public License.
Dedicated to the wisest being I ever had the pleasure of reading
  books of (currently spending some time dead for tax reasons).
The newest version can be found at the ACME homepage:
  http://home.pages.de/~mac_bacon/smorbrod/acme/

Usage: acme [OPTION...] [FILE]...
  -h, --help             show this help and exit.
  -f, --format FORMAT    select output format.
  -o, --outfile FILE     select output file.
  -l, --labeldump FILE   select label dump file.
      --setpc NUMBER     set program counter.
      --cpu CPU          select target processor.
      --initmem NUMBER   define 'empty' memory.
      --maxerrors NUMBER set number of errors before exiting.
      --maxdepth NUMBER  set recursion depth for macro calls and !src.
  -vDIGIT                set verbosity level.
  -V, --version          show version and exit.

Or maybe not. I turns out that this particular Acme is not the text editor I was looking for. A bit of digging around showed me where I’d gone wrong.

$ brew rm acme
$ brew install plan9port

Acme comes as part of the plan9port package. However, since this package installs a mostly completely Plan9 system (from what I can tell, anyway), it installs certain utilities that are common, like ls. In order to not stomp on your existing system, though, plan9port wraps it’s version of these commands in it’s own wrapper command 9. Now, finally, I can open Acme!

$ 9 acme

Success! On top of it all, it has native OS X full screen support! Bonus!

Now I’m starting at the default Acme window. Time to play around. Middle-click on New to open a new window. Middle-click on Del to close it. Right click on a file to open it. Awesome. Acme seems to be working.

The real fun will continue in the next episode. You can read the previous post here.