I like minimalist and sometimes esoteric dev environments but I must confess that I just don't get acme. I know that some people swear by it but it's hard for me not to think that it's the programming equivalent of listening to music on vinyls.
For one thing it's extremely mouse-driven, which is already disqualifying in my book but to each their own.
The whole "anything can be a tag and you can execute it by clicking the middle mouse button" can seem novel and exciting if you've never used Emacs, which did the whole "everything is configurable and scriptable" a long time ago and IMO better.
Then the lack of syntax highlighting is pure elitism in my book. I tried to give that a chance but when you listen to the arguments of its proponents it often boils down to "colors are childish" and "books are black on white and we read those just fine" which makes complete sense unless you think about it for two seconds.
I genuinely don't get it. When I first read a Vi(m) tutorial it seemed esoteric, complicated and weird, but I understood why some people found it more efficient that way. Watching somebody explain acme reminds me of TempleOS, filled with weird idiosyncrasies of dubious usefulness while lacking super basic features.
"books are black on white and we read those just fine"
Now I wanna see a B&W syntax highlighting setup that uses all the tools available to a book. Font sizes, bold/italics, the use of display fonts here and there, including Comic Sans to highlight Really Bad Ideas...
You laugh but I'm half-way there; I use underlines/bold for things like TODOS/FIXMES, different fonts for comments, different weight for brackets/keywords etc...
I’m not laughing at all, I am all for anything that gets people thinking about how shitty most digital typography is compared to what’s in a well-designed book!
> the lack of syntax highlighting is pure elitism in my book
That might be true.
When you get past the snark, there is a strong argument against syntax highlighting in Plan 9. If your desk is too messy to find anything, tidy it up; if your code is too messy to read, ditto. Syntax highlighting, from this perspective, is like bringing in a mechanical excavator when the answer is to stop digging. If you look at the Plan 9 code, they practiced what they preached.
But that perspective is an elite one, that of research programmers at Bell Labs, where the code is the product.
I would argue that highlighting the syntax is tidying up. It doesn’t stop you from keeping the code clean. Shooting yourself in the foot in order to not walk that much isn’t a compelling argument.
I guess you have to use it to see how consistent a workflow it is. The infuriating lack of good keyboard features aside, the acme way is refreshing and inspiring in my experience.
Simple anecdote: many terminal emulators highlight what they recognize as an URL, then make them clickable. Acme allows to make any text clickable and set the selection to a plumber, for action. A path, a git hash, a time stamp, whatever. This is so much better. Some terminal enulators can be used like that, foot natively on wayland, st with patches and urxvt with Perl extensions.
I dropped syntax highlighting a few years ago. My thoughts on it are not "colors are childish" and "books are black on white and we read those just fine." I don't like the computer trying to convey what is important in my text files to me via color. What I think is important and what the computer thinks is important is often different. Then why don't I configure my syntax highlighter to agree with me? It's just another configuration file to keep in sync on the computers I use, and :syntax off is right there... It's the nuclear option for being annoyed that comments are shown in light gray.
For one thing it's extremely mouse-driven, which is already disqualifying in my book but to each their own.
The whole "anything can be a tag and you can execute it by clicking the middle mouse button" can seem novel and exciting if you've never used Emacs, which did the whole "everything is configurable and scriptable" a long time ago and IMO better.
Then the lack of syntax highlighting is pure elitism in my book. I tried to give that a chance but when you listen to the arguments of its proponents it often boils down to "colors are childish" and "books are black on white and we read those just fine" which makes complete sense unless you think about it for two seconds.
I genuinely don't get it. When I first read a Vi(m) tutorial it seemed esoteric, complicated and weird, but I understood why some people found it more efficient that way. Watching somebody explain acme reminds me of TempleOS, filled with weird idiosyncrasies of dubious usefulness while lacking super basic features.