Your problem with Acme is you don’t grok Plan 9. [1] In Plan 9, everything’s a file. Acme in particular represents open buffers and windows as files on disk too. I don’t mean as copies of the text necessarily, but as sockets basically where you can send and receive data about a particular thing inside Acme. It’s kind of wild just how exposed it is. It’s not like you’re sending info to a single process server like an LSP server of today, no, you’re literally getting a file ID to go back to and write to when you finish doing what you’re doing.

Writing a plug-in is actually completely language agnostic. It’s just standard file IO.

Any time you middle click the name of a script, it executes that file by looking it up in a PATH equivalent (pretty sure it’s also project local as well, but I don’t remember).

This is really powerful for two reasons: everything’s an editable text field from your menu bar, your window bar, and the buttons on them; and chorded selections, basically you can send a selection to a command by selecting and then clicking on another piece of text to determine the command.

This allows you to create a UI tailored to whatever you’re doing as you’re doing it. If you watch someone program with Acme, they’re writing little snippets in their status bar to do common tasks, or for more involved things, they’re just creating a new buffer and typing or cut and pasting some relevant code they need to search different parts of (because searching is just one mouse click away). The best part is, you can just save and load that buffer for later. It’s just a plain text file.

It’s definitely a change up from the keyboard-driven focus we’ve come to see, but again, I think we gave up on the mouse way too quickly. If you’re really honest with yourself, I think you’ll find you aren’t constantly clipping around at 1,000 key presses per minute in Vim. You’re spurty, you sit and think, and then you type. Once I started thinking about hands on mouse time as thinking time, then it wasn’t nearly so unacceptable. I even came to prefer it (gasp).

[1] Sorry I couldn’t resist referencing the classic Vim/Vi write up.

...no, I'm pretty sure my problem with acme - and plan 9, actually - is that it's so mouse oriented. Clickable text and mouse chords are not by any means a bad system, but what I really want to do is never have to take my fingers off the keyboard

What I don't get is why any of that should require a mouse.

I used to think that way but modern mice and touchpads along with the relevant literature have convinced me that keyboard paired with mouse is more productive.

Keyboard with some mouse sprinkled in, sure. But Acme is very mouse heavy.

I guess I’m challenging the assertion that mostly keyboard with mouse sprinkled in is more efficient than more heavily mouse oriented UIs. There is literature that suggests otherwise and that literature was not based off state of the art mouse and touch pad technologies.