The window management is a huge win for me, if you'll pardon the unintentional pun. It's so much simpler and fluid than in Emacs or Vim, at least for me. I just kind of throw windows around and resize them with an ease and speed that I was never able to achieve on Emacs. For instance, when using Emacs I may have as many as 4 windows open at a time, frequently switching buffers around with the clumsy C-x b switching (I know there are better switchers). With Acme, I'll have 30 windows open, most of them stacked up with just the tag lines visible until I need them. When I need one, I just mid-click on the little box and it expands.
Execution of arbitrary text and loading/plumbing files/text with the mouse buttons is also really powerful for me, as you point out. I haven't finished watching the video yet (I'm at work), but in case he doesn't cover it, mouse chording is one of the most important capabilities in my mind. Makes copy-pasting significantly quicker.
(I have used both Acme and Emacs but only a little bit each) I can believe that most of the time it is easier to switch to the mouse to move the cursor where you want if it is no where near your current position. But what about just moving up and down one or two lines? Do you really just use Ctrl-A twice to go up a line? Or do you use the mouse? Or is there some alternative that I haven't heard yet?
As you say, there are great use cases for just having a simple keyboard shortcut. Ron Minnich made "smacme", a modified acme with the basic Emacs C-f, C-b, C-n, C-p bindings in; you can find it in the sources directory IIRC, but in any case it's really a pretty simple hack.
I've only found a reference in a 2006 post from Ron. Is it a modification to acme which would need to be ported to plan9port or is it already part of plan9port's acme or is it maybe just a set of scripts to source on acme startup?
Have you written up a summary of your experiences? I would love to see a comparison from an Emacs user that switched to Acme.
So many of the concepts just seem painful to me at first glance (What? I have to use the mouse for things?) but I am sure that there is some merit to them, given that some of the greats used it.
What OS do you use it on, and what is it like using the plumber with other (non-Plan 9) components of the system?
I haven't written up a big summary, just occasional posts like this on HN and elsewhere. I started life as an Emacs user, switched to Vim, flip-flopped between the two for various tasks. The whole time, in the background, I was playing with Plan 9 and Acme; eventually I got sufficiently addicted to Acme that I dropped Emacs and Vim for most of my editing. I still use Emacs as a mail reader (and nothing else), Vim for quick edits or working on a remote system, and Acme for everything else.
I don't actually take the Plan9Ports thing as far as I could (I work on Linux, mostly, often with a drawterm connection open to our Plan 9 server). I run a plumber, and Acme, but I don't run rio (the window manager) or 9term (the xterm replacement), which means I'm going to miss out on some of the plumbing stuff. Mostly I just run the plumber so I can say "B <filename>" at a shell to have it pop up in my Acme.
Thanks. I find a lot of the Plan 9 stuff very fascinating, and I often think about what it would take to port some of the functionality to OSX.
I find it interesting that you mentioned the window management as being one of the big selling points. I have been working on a tiling window manager for OSX, and might try adding a mode like that. It would mean splitting my emacs into frames, which could be weird. Probably worth messing around with, though.
Also, I have several emacsclient based commands to do things like the plumber/acme, but is a pretty poor attempt at reimplementation.
Emacs buffers ergonomy is quite low. I found some elisp to transpose buffers layout (pretty awesome). Some maximize / shadow code would be handy. It would be great to have one layout lib included in standard distro.
Execution of arbitrary text and loading/plumbing files/text with the mouse buttons is also really powerful for me, as you point out. I haven't finished watching the video yet (I'm at work), but in case he doesn't cover it, mouse chording is one of the most important capabilities in my mind. Makes copy-pasting significantly quicker.