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Comment by fafner | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit surprised that he is happy with a Mac Book. His editor acme requires three mouse buttons and Apple is designed for one mouse button use. Does he use an external mouse all the time?

And I'm a bit disappointed that he's not using Plan9. With the current ease of VMs there are no driver and installation issues and he could move the snapshot around.

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For acme chording, Rob carries around a tiny external 3-button mouse that he likes. I use the keyboard modifiers. Both approaches work fine.

And that's what I expected to be in the interview. Too bad he drifted off to quickly into his plan9/cloud rant. Thanks for your reply.

You can use acme with a MacBook. First of all Cmd-x, Cmd-c and Cmd-v works. Second, Cmd and Option with the mousepad gives you clicks on buttons 2 and 3.

Still I prefer to have a mouse when I am working on larger texts because it is so much easier to do text rearrangement with a mouse.

A correctly set up acme on a mac is surprisingly effective.

You answered most of the question I came here to ask. How about chording though? I'm under the impression that there are actions that are triggered by all three mouse buttons simultaneously.

I'm hoping to give acme a serious try (I have it installed), but I need to be sure I won't have to start using a three button mouse rather than whatever is provided by my system.

I think you will have an easier time learning the environment if you use a 3-button mouse, but it's not a requirement. I spend some entire days in acme on a MacBook Air, and the keyboard modifiers and %-C, %-V, %-X keyboard shortcuts on the Mac work well for me.

Agreed, as acme makes much better sense when you're equipped with a 3-button mouse.

For anyone interested: You may want to purchase an HP DY651A. It's an affordable 3-button optical USB mouse (and, yes, it's a real 3-button one).

http://h30094.www3.hp.com/product.asp?sku=2545791

As Russ (rsc) says, it is not a requirement, but it is easier in my opinion. There are two common operation classes: sweeping while a button is held down and chording invocation. Sweeping is easy, as soon as you learn to hold down a key while sweeping.

Chording is mostly used - except for one specific chord which isn't extremely common to use - for Cut/Copy/Paste. And you already have that on the Cmd-bindings, so they are not that needed.

Surely he can use gestures instead of physical buttons?

Certainly gestures make the difference between one and two button trackpads a non-issue — if anything, I find it easier and more natural than reaching for a separate button — and it can't be too difficult to scale this to three buttons.

Mouse clicks in acme usually accompany precise cursor positioning, so I don't think gestures would work well.

Did something change recently? Every time I've tried to install plan9 in virtualbox or vmware it ran incredibly slow. Not like "wow this is slow" slow, but "there is something broken here" slow. Just the installation took several hours.

Inferno [1] can run hosted and gives a lot of the Plan 9 feel. You might find it useful if you're wanting to try it out. It might even run on your phone [2].

[1] http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/ [2] http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2012/06/11/building-inferno-os-...

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