I was never as much a fan of Acme. It was a neat idea, but I don't think it was executed as well as Emacs was. And it doesn't work super well outside plan9. And I need to edit over SSH a lot. And keyboard > mouse, IMHO.
I use Acme on and off. I will never be as productive with it as I am with Emacs (I depend way too much on autocompletion, contextual text wrapping, org-mode and magit), but the philosophy appeals to me.
UNIX as an IDE never truly made sense until I discovered Acme. It was truly a zen-like experience.
...And were you not listening to the point which started this discussion, which is that I do most of my development on a Chromebook, and all that has is SSH.
Yeah, but the SSH connection is slow enough as it is. VNC would be quite unpleasant. Also, this is laptop, so I've got a touchpad. Not the best thing for Acme.
For pointing to a location in 2-dimensions, a mouse is hard to beat with a keyboard; when locating a point on a map to someone, do you say "Start at the bottom left, then up two inches and over four inches to the right" or do you just point?
Well no one is suggesting that you'd input characters any other way, and acme supports sam's structural regular expression command language for keyboard-based editing; so acme supports the keyboard features you're looking for and also has, as you've admitted, better navigation, via the mouse. I suggest you give acme (and/or sam) another try without the prevailing pro-keyboard bias of those people commenting on HN.
Doing a lot of switching between keyboard and mouse will slow you down, IMHO. But that's just me. You're free to have your opinion.
But as I've asked elsewhere, does acme have the ability to send text to an external repl on systems other than plan9 (a continuously running one, not a freshly-spawned one), preferably one running in another terminal window? Does it have indentation for Lisp? does it have syntax highlighting (not necessary, but handy)? does it have colorscheme customization (you'd be surprised how many programs generate illegible text in white-on-black terminals, and I've become quite fond of Solarized)? Can it look up documentation for the functions I'm using (very handy at times)?
I've got the tools I'm used to, and they provide things that Acme never will for me. Maybe I'm not experiencing ultimate Unix Philosophy Zen. Maybe using the mouse is a bit more efficient. But at the end of the day, I'm here to edit text, and Emacs works in my environment, and has some pretty good tools for that.
But my opinion regarding the mouse being faster is supported by research; the opinion that the keyboard is faster or that context switching slows you down is factually incorrect.
Okay. First off, I can use the mouse with Emacs in most contexts. Second off, the time I'm wasting may well be more than the time I'm gaining from all the features I use that Acme doesn't have. Finally, I use my editor over SSH a lot, so Acme is a non-option for me, even if it is so unbelievably brilliant (it isn't).
...until you're doing remote dev work, especially in Lisp, and need a repl, autoindent, or any other feature that Sam doesn't have. Given, it's an uncommon need, but one that I have every day.
Not sure what you mean, I do remote development all the time.
> and need a repl
Why do you need a lisp repl in sam? The unix shell is a repl too, and I use it in a separate terminal, which talks to sam via the Plan 9 plumber.
I use multiple terminals and sometimes even multiple sam instances, and I consider this a big plus, rather than doing everything through a single program.
> autoindent
Sam supports autoindent just fine. But perhaps you mean some other form of "smart" indent though.
You're right that sam (and acme) don't have features. The functionality comes from programs interacting with each other through the plumber or some other method.
I was not aware that Sam had as many hooks as acme. If sam can send text to the terminal, than that's alright, I guess. But if you can't send program text to the interpreter...
As I'm running a Unix (Linux, at present), I really don't have the full power of the plumber at my disposal.
As for autoindent, I was talking about Lisp code, which most autoindenters don't indent properly. This is one of several reasons that the original vi had a dedicated mode for editing lisp code. Yes, really. You can look it up.
Anyways, I'm an emacs user. Saying we do everything through one program is like saying that every Smalltalk program is the same: we do everything through one VM. It's not as elegant, true, but it works right now. And outside of plan 9, acme and sam are a little hit and miss by comparison.
