There was a heyday of WM stuff back in the late 90s. You had the minimalist stuff, a bunch of partly emulated platform UIs (OpenSTEP, Windows, Mac, etc.), but also tiling / text-based WMs (emacs etc.) and full-on 3D desktop platforms (compiz). Acme is an early example, but I can't see why it's otherwise notable.
In hindsight it feels like that heterogeneity, which seems to have been born of the millenial surge in Unix popularity linked to the rise of Linux and the internet, later cross-pollinated to Windows and WMs became a thing there too.
More recent trends include multi-screen/docking, high-DPI and what appears to be a general shift toward IDEs, a dalliance with containers and cloud deployment. What does the future hold? VR development (xrdesktop? cube?)? Tactile feedback? Keyboard input seems outmoded...
I think one question acme tries to answer is “how do you have a Unix-like interface to a computer that is more than a text terminal.” Look at emacs where you have this great text-based environment but it is full of all sorts of weird things and everything is all controlled through an (admittedly great) internal programming language. Sure it can run external programs (simple with M-! or more complicatedly with process filters). Compare to vim which makes some claims to be more unixy but really that just means it does less and has basically no more gui than in a terminal. It still operates through its own internal editing language.
In acme, one of the primary operations is to execute, and one easily executed normal Unix commands. More complicated programs can interact with acme through the virtual file system it presents.
Also worth noting is Wily, a Unix clone of Acme [1]. A stalled project, occasionally crashing, but with a great overall feel. Acme without the Plan 9 or Inferno battery pack.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 11.8 ms ] threadIn hindsight it feels like that heterogeneity, which seems to have been born of the millenial surge in Unix popularity linked to the rise of Linux and the internet, later cross-pollinated to Windows and WMs became a thing there too.
More recent trends include multi-screen/docking, high-DPI and what appears to be a general shift toward IDEs, a dalliance with containers and cloud deployment. What does the future hold? VR development (xrdesktop? cube?)? Tactile feedback? Keyboard input seems outmoded...
In acme, one of the primary operations is to execute, and one easily executed normal Unix commands. More complicated programs can interact with acme through the virtual file system it presents.
1: http://www.cs.yorku.ca/~oz/wily/