aka: plumbing

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.)