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Russ Cox Uses This

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98 pointsflapjack21 comments

I lost interest in having the new shiny a long time ago. [..] At home that means a refurbished Mac Mini from 2006, a used Dell 2001FP 20" LCD from 2004 [..]

Is this "one of those things" that happens as you get older? To my own surprise, I've drifted into the "can't deal with the boom-boom music on the radio" zone just as my parents did in their 30s.. So will "new shinies are boring" be next? I better start stocking up on Apple gear ;-)

Maybe. I recently gave my 2007 MBP a new life by putting a Corsair SSD in it. This thing is as fast as a new MBP! I saved heaps of money and it rocks. Although, the battery lasts 12 mins from full charge. :)

I'd love if macs were not so designed to 'throw away and buy new'. That's just the steve way though.

I'm also getting less enthusiastic about new gadgets. I'm noticing that my desire for hardware updates is getting further and further apart.

That might be because I'm getting older, or because the difference from one generation to the next is less impressive than it used to be, or both...

But SSD, yes, that's one development I wouldn't want to be without. The speed up is incredible. I'm thinking of retrofitting my "ancient" laptop with one.

Yes, it happens. Though I'm probably not the best example- I can't say I ever really had much use for shiny.

For the longest time I had a crappy K5 based system with 64Mb of RAM running Slackware when all my friends had Pentium 2's and whatever OS ran Quake at the time.

Oh, and I used a pizza box for the "case".

Whatever works for what you're doing.

I will admit though, I lusted over an SGI O2.

How did you ventilate the box, aren't pizza boxes designed to insulate?

The motherboard was inside with the fan sticking out a hole I cut in the top. The PSU and disks were sitting naked on top.

I just don't have the desire or time to tinker anymore. I used to spend days researching the best parts and tinkering with my setup to get it just right. Now I just want something that works and gets out of my way.

I can vouch for re2 - if you need to run a lot of regexps, or run user-supplied regexps, or run non-trivial regexps on user-supplied arbitrary data, re2 will save your application from certain death if you use pcre. Google "catastrophic backtracking" if you don't believe me.

Also, even though it doesn't say that Russ uses it, he probably must one way or the other working at Google, I highly recommend another google code project - protobuf.

I know this isn't a tech support forum, but in a fit of lunacy I figured I'd give Acme a try last night (the Acme-SAC version) and after using it for an hour of so I can't even figure out how to open a text file (it seems like it has its own virtual directory structure that I can't seem to navigate out of).

Anybody here successfully using Acme for coding?

For Acme, remember that it's an editor on a shell, with Unix DNA. Also remember that Acme-SAC is based on Inferno.

But, being nix-ish, if you want to know something, just man whatever. To start, type 'man intro' someplace. Then shift-click-sweep the cursor over the text to highlight, and alt-click the highlighted text (plumb).

Notice in the article how rsc mentions the three mouse buttons more than once? The missing buttons on the Mac are a big reason Acme SAC doesn't fly for me, no matter how much I'd like it to.

I think it would be really great on a Mac, but would need some tweaking to get there.

1) There still are real 3-button mice for sale: HP DY651A goes for $12. It's a very nice USB optical mouse with 3 buttons and no scroll wheel. Perfect for Acme. If you insist on using a flawed one button apple mouse, you only have yourself to blame.

2) If you're on a Mac, you can run the plan9port version of Acme, no need for Acme-SAC.

I'm on a laptop, and just don't bother with a mouse. Some of the tweaking I mentioned would be to deemphasize the mouse and focus on the usual trackpad 2,3,4 finger actions instead. Just for Acme SAC though.

I use the plan9 from userspace[1] version a lot on both Linux and OS X, almost exclusively actually. Read the man page[2] or even the paper[3]. I recommend giving it some time to get used to, it pays off.

Acme-SAC is built on top of Inferno; the virtual directory structure you're seeing is Inferno's namespace. I find it helps if you know a bit about that first.

[1] http://swtch.com/plan9port/

[2] http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html?man=acme&sect=...

[3] http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/acme/acme.html

The obvious answer is to right-click on a file to open it.

If you mean open a file externally then I suggest you run acme from plan9port, then just run 'plumber' and use the program 'plumb' to send open commands to acme. It is fairly flexible:

    $ plumb /path/to/file
    $ plumb /path/to/file:35
    $ plumb /path/to/file:/NameError

The nice thing is if the file is already open, acme will jump to the right place and highlight what you want.

I think some of your confusion may be a result of using acme-SAC. I recall acme-SAC is built on top of Inferno, which is actually a small semivirtualized operating system. I think the host filesystem is accessible via the #U* kernel device, which means you would first issue a bind command to put #U* somewhere in your namespace. Also, if you are using gnu/linux or bsd, you could try plan9port's version of acme.

windows acme-sac is my day to day programming environment. the host file system is available at /n/C and /n/D (/n/local on linux and os x).

Thank you, that works. I felt like an idiot for not being able to figure out how to actually navigate to my filesystem.

"I use Unison to sync files between my various computers. Dropbox seems to be the hot new thing, but I like that Unison doesn't ever store my files on someone else's computers."

I was intrigued by the sam editor. Anyone here using it?

Read the Sam paper: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/sam/sam.pdf

tl;dr. Russ dogfoods.

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