As described by the other commentator, this isn't quite the same. My normal workflow is 2 command line windows and ~3-4 open files. Doing this in tmux while trying to maintain the ability to move and split windows at will means that's 3-4 instances of vim. Not a great experience if I want to save all. Also, moving windows in tmux/screen has, for me, always been a huge pain of remembering a bunch of keyboard shortcuts. In acme I just click and drag stuff.
Tmux in vim can be made quite convenient for an acme user :
- tmux mouse support gets better every release, so you can actually select, send or exec, there is no chording though.
- vim has remote features, so you don't need multiple vim instances. Yoy can "send" to a running vim instance. Vim splits are pretty powerful, buffers being independent.
- neovim has :term support too, i would not recommend it
Acme found a nice usability sweet spot, mixing an editor with shell and a tiling wm.
Tmux and vim can imitate some interesting behaviour such as 3-click to open, but the general behaviour isn't as consistent.
Tmux isn't vi/vim, though. Part of the Plan 9 perspective is realizing that the terminal emulator as we know it today is a hack and should be discounted. This is an example of it, using Tmux to try to stuff functionality that shouldn't be/isn't in the emulator or program in the emulator into the emulator.