Acme

Acme is a fun little editor ported from Plan 9 that is easily expandable. It doesn't come with all the bells and whistles you expect from an editor today, but it is pretty easy to customize.

I've been playing with it for a few months now and the only things I really miss from Emacs are syntax highlighting and some features from DIRED. You can expand it by piping buffers very similar to how you pipe commands in a shell. These commands can be part of the text itself, or the TAG line which is essentially a second buffer for that windows menu. You can use a command in the window or TAG to modify the TAG.

Menu commands, or commands in the body of the text are executed by middle clicking on them. The commands can take highlighted text as input for the command, insert the result of the command, or filter the buffered content through a pipe.

You'll definitely want Plan 9 Port in your path and probably want fontsrv running. Here's a few excerpts from my ~/.profile file.

path_add() {
    if ! echo $PATH |grep $1 >/dev/null ;
    then
	PATH=$PATH:$1
	(date; echo path_add PATH=$PATH:$1) >>$STARTLOG
    fi
}

# installed plan9port from github
# git clone https://github.com/9fans/plan9port plan9
if [ -d /usr/local/plan9 ]; then
	PLAN9=/usr/local/plan9
	export PLAN9
	path_add $PLAN9/bin
# It's convenient to have plumber and fontsrv running with acme
	pgrep plumber || plumber
	pgrep fontsrv || fontsrv &
fi

Saving the selected font(s) appears to be bugged on Plan 9 Port, but you can toggle fonts by middle clicking "Font" or select a font by highlighting and middle clicking, "Font fix /mnt/font/NotoSansMono-Regular/14a/font" .

You can also pass the font when you launch acme by using the -f (proportional font) or -F (fixed font), so using a startup script should work.

"Space Glenda" artwork is from Plan 9 Port