Acme

アクメ・インターフェース / 1994– / Style / Platform Screen Languages

Acme is the interface Rob Pike described in a 1994 paper, a hybrid of window system, shell and editor. It has no icons and no pop-up or pull-down menus; any string anywhere on screen can be executed with the middle button or opened with the right one. Windows are stacked in columns, and each is only a one line tag above a body.

Windows are stacked in columns, and each window is just a one line tag above a body / The scroll bar sits at the left edge of the body, and nothing sits at the right / Sweeping a string with the middle button underlines it only while the button is held / The body is pale yellow and the tag pale blue, and there is not one button or icon to click

Acme — The acme screen of Plan 9 from Bell Labs — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 — The acme screen of Plan 9 from Bell Labs — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0

Dictionary entry

Best used for: When a working screen should stop gaining widgets and let every place you can type hold a command · When a development environment is meant to be extended by users typing commands into the tag themselves
Type: One typeface, one size. No bold and no coloured text; state is shown by an underline and by inverted selection only.
Composition: Split the screen into columns and stack windows inside them. Each window is a one line tag above a body. Take no margin, and separate neighbours with a single thin rule.
Material: Two ground colours only: pale yellow for the body, pale blue for the tag, black for the text. Underline execution in dark red and reference in dark green, and fill the centre of the small square at the left of the tag when the file has been modified.
Caution: Copy the look and turn the tag into a fixed menu, and you lose the actual mechanism, which is that any string at all can be a command.
Further study: the definition Rob Pike's paper sets down, a hybrid of window system, shell and editor / the mechanism whereby everything to the right of the vertical bar in the tag is free scratch space, so a command written there stays put / what was carried over and what was left out from Oberon and Cedar, which the same paper compares

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