Russ Cox has posted a video tour of the Acme editor. If I weren’t using (and extraordinarily happy with) Emacs, this is the editor I would be using. For a long time it was only available with Plan 9 but Cox missed it so much when he stopped working on Plan 9 that he ported it and much of the Plan 9 environment to Unix like systems (such as FreeBSD, Linux, and OS X). That port is available to all as Plan 9 from User Space.
The video is entertaining and well worth a look. Perhaps it will give you some ideas that you will want to port to Emacs.
“Acme makes extensive use of the mouse.”
And we’re done.
Yes. It’s actually worse than that: there is no cursor addressing at all. Acme has a lot of really good ideas but being totally mouse driven ruins it for me too. Rob Pike has long claimed that mouses driven editing is more efficient (and cites studies to back that up) but I’m not convinced.
My other complaint is the lack of text highlighting. It’s not a deal breaker but Emacs has pretty much ruined plain black text for me.
Still, I really like some of the ideas in Acme. I think, as I hinted in the post, that there may be some ideas worth porting into Emacs.
Not just heavy usage of the mouse, but heavy usage of multiple mouse buttons at the same time – it’s built around a three-button chording paradigm.
Acme (and wily before it) are pretty fun, but are a lot easier to adopt when you’re moving to an entirely new UI. Acme, 9wm, 9term, and rc or es make a pretty potent combo, but it’s also very fixed-choices spartan, especially compared to the current common OS offerings.
Sam (the original Plan 9 editor) had a really cool split architecture that separates the part that changes files from the UI, enabling some nifty distributed stuff that I wanted in emacs for a long time, but would require a near-full rewrite of emacs. Acme was more integrated (the common mail reader and debugger was basically built on acme), so sam’s nifty idea is basically stuck in the past of Plan 9, at least until another big paradigm shift. It would be especially useful in a world of ubiquitous 4G tablets, for example.