I’ve written before about the Acme editor. The first time it was about Russ Cox’s video tour of Acme. The second was Vince Foley’s take on Acme as an Emacs user. Those were almost 10 years ago so perhaps it’s time for another look.
Ben Hancock has a post entitled The Tao of Acme that is another Emacs user’s look at Acme. His post differs from Foley’s in that he came away from the trial an Acme convert. As I’ve said before, there’s a lot to like about Acme but there’s also a lot the average Emacs user—including me—finds off-putting.
First, Acme is almost completely mouse driven. Its author, Rob Pike, is a believer in mouse driven navigation and believes it to be faster than the keyboard alternative. Any Emacs user who has bothered to master Emacs navigation and uses something like Avy to move around the visible buffer is going to beg to differ on that and probably adamantly take the opposing position. If your editing strategy includes eschewing the mouse at all times, you’re not going to like Acme.
The other thing that new Acme users complain about is the lack of syntax highlighting. Again, this is Pike’s personal choice and was done on purpose.
If the above doesn’t bother you, there’s a lot to like about Acme. A look at Cox’s video will give you a good idea. A major difference from Emacs is that almost nothing is built in. If you need a specialized regular expression search, say, you provide it with a shell script. In a way, that means Acme provides an even more personalized environment than Emacs but at the cost of having to implement all your specialized commands yourself.
Acme is an interesting editor that many might find attractive. It’s available on most platforms now so you don’t have to be running Plan 9 to use it.