Mouse Shortcuts in Acme

"Acme has a very simple mouse interface, the first button selects text, the second button selects text, and the third button also selects text." -- Charles Forsyth (paraphrased)

Acme uses a very special, and I might add, cool, 'mouse chording' system that makes many complex text editing operations very simple and fast.

Basic mouse operations

• Button One - Select text.
• Button One double click - Select word under cursor, or at the end/start of a line, select the whole line.
• Button Two - Execute text*.
• Button Three - Plumb, if plumb fails, search for next occurrence of text*.

* This applies either to text 'sweep' by the mouse while holding down this button, or to the word/command under the cursor if it is clicked once.

Mouse chords

• After selecting with Button One and while still holding Button One down (These chords also work with text selected by double-clicking, the double-click expansion happens when the second click starts, not when it ends):
  • Clicking Button Two cuts.
  • clicking Button Three pastes (Can be reverted by clicking Button Two immediately afterwards).
  • To snarf (ie., copy) click Button Two* immediately followed by Button Three.
• While holding down button 2 on text to be executed as a command, clicking button 1 appends the text last pointed to by button 1 as a distinct final argument. (For example, to search for literal text one may execute Look text with button 2 or instead point at text with button 1 in any window, release button 1, then execute Look, clicking button 1 while 2 is held down.)

(This list of chords is incomplete, for now see the acme(1) manual page for an explanation of mouse chording.)

See Also

• The Acme Readme - It includes a discussion of the Acme user interface in general with many examples.