Impressive video presentation of acme(1), a “text editor” written by Rob Pike. If you saw the introducing Xiki, it may look familiar. Many ideas from Xiki are implemented in Acme. The idea that text IS the interface is pushed quite far in Acme.

I’m a Vim user, I like to use the keyboard only to drive my computer. Acme takes a completely different approach: The mouse is used everywhere, the mouse does more than in regular programs: Button 2 execute the selected command for example. I never used it, but I’m very tempted to look into it. My main grief with Vim is that is difficult to script: VimScript is yet another language you got to learn. The programming interface in Vim seems to be kind of ad-hoc and looks difficult to learn and use.

Acme seems to be easier to interact with programmatically. It may very well be my next text editor.