The wily editor^[120] is a clone of the Plan 9 editor acme.^[121] It shares some facilities with Sam, but is intended to provide a fundamentally different user experience. Although Wily probably sees the least widespread use of any of these editors, it is interesting because it illustrates a different and arguably more Unixy way of implementing an Emacs-like programmable editor.

Wily could be described as a minimalist IDE, an implementation of Emacs-style extensibility without the decades of accompanying cruft. In Wily, even global search and replace, that sine qua non of Unix editors, is supplied by an external program. The built-in commands relate almost exclusively to windowing operations. Wily is designed from the ground up to use the mouse as much, and as well, as possible.

Wily attempts to replace not only conventional editors but conventional terminal windows such as xterm(1) as well. In Wily, any piece of text within the main window (which contains multiple non-overlapping Wily windows) can be an action or a search expression. The left mouse button is used to select text, the middle button to execute text as a command (either built-in or external), and the right button to search either Wily's buffers or the file system for text. No permanent or popup menus are required.

In Wily, the keyboard is used only to enter text. Shortcuts are achieved not by special use of the keyboard, but by holding down more than one mouse button at the same time. These shortcuts are always equivalent to using the middle button on some built-in command.

Wily can also be used as the front end for C, Python, or Perl programs, reporting to them whenever a window is changed or an execute or search command is performed with the mouse. These plugins function analogously to Emacs modes, but don't run in the same address space with Wily; instead, they communicate with it via a very simple set of remote procedure calls. Wily comes packaged with an xterm analog and a mail tool which uses it as the editing front end.

Because Wily depends on the mouse so heavily, it cannot be used on a character-cell-only console display; nor can it be used over a remote link without X forwarding. As an editor, Wily is designed for editing plain text; it has only two fonts (one proportional and one fixed-width) and has no mechanism that could support rich-text editing or syntax awareness.