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A Tour of the Acme Editor

Russ Cox · tutorial · Watch on YouTube

Testing, debugging & developer toolsGUI, HCI & interface history

What it is

Russ Cox gives a 23-minute tour of the Acme text editor from Plan 9, showing its mouse-driven interface, executing commands from text, and its filesystem-based interface to other programs.

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN points people to it as the best introduction to Acme and its very different take on editors, shells, and GUIs.

  • 11 people recommended it
  • 10 different months
  • 3 strong recommendations
  • first 2012, last 2026

What HN commenters said

  1. “Russ Cox has a great video tour of Acme's features here”

    Great tour of Acme's features and filesystem-based design

    teeray, 2014-06 · Strong recommendation · in “Why Atom Can’t Replace Vim – Learning the lesson of vi”

  2. “(excellent overview of the editor by Russ Cox)”

    Excellent overview of Acme editor by Russ Cox

    marttt, 2022-07 · Strong recommendation · in “Ask HN: Is there other software similar to Vim and Emacs?”

  3. “What inspired me to work this way was this video on the acme editor”

    Inspired the commenter's tmux panel workflow

    alganet, 2025-06 · Strong recommendation · in “Starship: A minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell”

  4. “If you haven't seen acme in action, it is pretty crazy and interesting.”

    Tutorial on Acme's mouse-driven, commands-from-text design

    mdonahoe, 2012-10 · Recommendation · in “UsesThis: Rob Pike”

  5. “For a really different take on editors+shells, check out acme”

    A really different take on editors and shells

    muraiki, 2016-02 · Recommendation · in “Why GNU Emacs?”

  6. “Russ Cox's ACME tutorial”

    Russ Cox's Acme tutorial among liked developer talks

    Esau, 2016-10 · Recommendation · in “Ask HN: What is your favorite YouTube channel for developers?”

  7. “Piping, inputing and outputing from commands are some of the most basic operations there.”

    Acme makes piping and command I/O basic operations

    black_knight, 2017-02 · Recommendation · in “Adventures in /usr/bin and the likes”

  8. “I recommend viewing this [1] introduction video.”

    Introduction video to mouse-oriented Acme editor

    hawski, 2017-02 · Recommendation · in “A curated list of Terminal frameworks, plugins and resources”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: acme, plan 9, text editors, russ cox, mouse interface

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