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Acme Text Editor Setup

Install Plan 9 from User Space

Plan 9 from User Space (a.k.a. plan9port) ports many programs from the Plan 9 operating system, including the Acme text editor, to Unix-like operating systems. For Microsoft Windows, plan9port can be used in WSL: refer to setup-wsl.md and then return here.

Obtain plan9port. While various packages exist (e.g., in FreeBSD, Homebew, and the Arch Linux repositories), it is better to use the most up-to-date version, which means compiling from source.

sudo mkdir /usr/local/plan9
sudo chown $(id -u -n):$(id -g -n) /usr/local/plan9
git clone https://github.com/9fans/plan9port /usr/local/plan9

Notes:

  • /usr/local/plan9 is the "usual" directory for plan9port, but it can go elsewhere, such as $HOME/plan9. Just be sure that the PLAN9 shell variable is set correctly.
  • There are many forks of plan9port that make changes to Acme that would not be accepted by upstream, such as alternate color schemes, additional key bindings, or support for tab expansion. You might want to use one of these or create your own. If so, the fork's URL can be substituted above.

On macOS, Xcode needs to be installed (it can be found in the Mac App Store). On Linux and *BSD systems (but not macOS), plan9port uses X11; on some distributions, the X11 header files are split into separate packages that need to be installed separately.

# Debian
sudo apt-get install libx11-dev libxext-dev libxt-dev
# Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install xorg-dev
# Void Linux
sudo xbps-install libXext-devel libXt-devel fontconfig-devel
# On FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Arch Linux, installing Xorg seems to install the
# necessary headers.  Other distributions may vary.

Build plan9port:

cd /usr/local/plan9
./INSTALL

Define $PLAN9 and update $PATH in the initialization file for your shell of choice, e.g.:

echo 'export PLAN9=/usr/local/plan9' >> ~/.zshrc
echo 'export PATH=$PATH:$PLAN9/bin' >> ~/.zshrc

Running Acme

While Acme can be started by invoking the acme executable directly, typically it is desirable to define several environment variables and to pass in arguments to control the fonts. For this reason, Acme is usually opened via a wrapper script. The one in this repository is bin/9a.

# Create shortcut
git clone https://github.com/ixtenu/acmerc ~/acmerc
ln -s ~/acmerc/bin/9a ~/bin/9a
# Run Acme (asynchronous)
9a

Helper Scripts

Acme is intended to be extended via the toolbox of utility programs found on a Unix (or Plan 9) system. Often it is handy to create wrapper scripts that build upon Unix programs such as sed(1) or fmt(1) to perform common functions. Several of the scripts in ixtenu/script are useful within Acme:

git clone https://github.com/ixtenu/script ~/script
script/install.sh

Tools

For notes on tools which complement Acme (with a focus on software development), see tools.md.

Updating plan9port

While plan9port does not change rapidly, it is updated. If using the upstream plan9port, updating is simple:

cd $PLAN9
git pull
# If there were new commits:
./INSTALL

If using a plan9port fork, you will have to merge the upstream changes into your repository or branch.