I wouldn't have said so. Even ignoring the fact that it's a GUI app, it's also mouse driven. And the "CLI" aspect of Acme is really just a novel way of implementing shortcuts and macros, but since those functions are non-interactive, it's not really behaving like a command line.
At risk of nitpcking, I think the "other CLI" option should have read "other console based" (that is, unless they were expecting people to answer with the likes of sed hehe).
I don't understand what you mean with the CLI aspect of acme. Could you elaborate?
But re:"other cli" I agree: even ed counts as console-based, not CLI (which would be sed, cat, maybe awk and echo... not fun, but of course real programmers use butterflies)
With Acme, any piece of text can be executed as a command with a (IIRC) middle mouse button click.
So in one pane on Acme, you can have the following written down:
ls ~/dev
uptime
and middle clicking uptime or highlighting and then middle clicking ls ~/dev would literally run those commands and return the output in a new Acme pane (you can even go a step further and have commands inside comments in your source code - as it's all just text to Acme).
What's more, the File / Save menus are just a text pane that you can edit, delete and add text to. So Acme follows some of the paradigms of working with the command line in terms of the application being controlled by text rather than hotkeys and widgets. But essentially it's still a mouse-driven application.
Also, I up-voted you just for the subtly of the XKCD reference (usually people just drop the URL with much thought of adding their own wit to the conversation). Nicely done :)
Oh, I didn't think of middle clicking as "CLI" related in any way... I'm a relative newbie with respect to Acme, but I have recorded some videos in my blog (tagged Acme) about cool stuff you can do with it, and that I find beautiful in its own way. I love emacs (and in fact also vim, I use evil in emacs) but I find some of the ideas behind acme just too cool to overlook. You can drive acme completely, making it a gui to your text-based code (via the virtual file system /acme/events which pipes everything that goes on in the acme window!)
In Acme, middle click executes text under the cursor (and middle selection executes selection,) whereas right-click looks for text/opens file depending on what you point it to. You can also add extra arguments to commands (via the 1-2 chord, where you select something with the left button, select something else with the middle button and click the left button afterwards, so you can have ~/dev in your file pane, ls in another pane and execute ls ~/dev in one go without typing anything else.
Now I understand your comment. Just a side remark, ~ usually doesn't work correctly in Plan9 from User Space and you have to input all the path... I'm sure it can be worked around, but I haven't got time to figure it out.
Re: XKCD reference, I just love that comic. I even went as far as using it as the image in the "landing page" (or index, depending on how you think about it) in my personal page at the department I did my PhD... I'm still the only emacs user among ~30 hardcore unix users that have a preference for vi and vim (yes, both, I didn't forget the "m".) I can understand that they like vim (or I could if they knew more vim than they do, but they mostly don't and miss all the cool stuff vim has to offer, which is lots) but I just can't get why they don't even try emacs to see what other intelligent beings see in it. I have done it with vim, acme and I even try to use sam and ed occasionally to get used to different paradigms in editing. Probably I'm just nuts :)
> Now I understand your comment. Just a side remark, ~ usually doesn't work correctly in Plan9 from User Space and you have to input all the path... I'm sure it can be worked around, but I haven't got time to figure it out.
Sorry you're right. I was having a moment of absentmindedness there. The issue is Plan 9 doesn't use tilde as a shortcut for home[1] so I don't think there's anything you can do (short of editing the source code and aliasing it manually)
> I'm still the only emacs user among ~30 hardcore unix users that have a preference for vi and vim (yes, both, I didn't forget the "m".) I can understand that they like vim (or I could if they knew more vim than they do, but they mostly don't and miss all the cool stuff vim has to offer, which is lots) but I just can't get why they don't even try emacs to see what other intelligent beings see in it. I have done it with vim, acme and I even try to use sam and ed occasionally to get used to different paradigms in editing. Probably I'm just nuts :)
People are busy and if you're already efficient in one editor then there's often little incentive to try another. I did give Acme a try though - used it pretty heavily for about a week then came to the conclusion that it was getting in the way more than it was speeding things up (eg it's become habit to use middle click to paste text). Plus most of my work is done inside SSH sessions, so I wasn't really making much use of the Acme's innovative features.
It's a bit of a pity because I do like the concept behind Acme and if it was customisable than I could probably tweak it to fit in better with my work flow. Maybe one day I'll give it another try, but for now it was more jarring than performance enhancing :(
I edited the source of p9ports to add ctrl-click to work as left-click (so I could chord while on my macbook without mouse.) It's a relatively plain codebase (I could find my way, so it should be easy... I'm very far from being able to navigate a lot of C code easily unless I have written it myself) but the tilde tweak would be just too much :(
I feel your acme-pain. In some sense it is wonderful, but in many others is just a pain. I still use it (just to get the feeling) for occasional small coding and for plain ol' writing: I just added wwb (the writer's workbench, a set of command line tools to analyse text) to my usual tag line and use it to test my writing for the blog and some lengthy emails and the link. It's handy for that (not that I couldn't do it in emacs)
