| Thank you for engaging in the conversation. This is the kind of response I was hoping for. :) I'm not nearly as experienced with Vim as you are, even though I've been using it for a similar amount of time, along with Emacs. I've never written my own plugins, though have deeply configured them to my preference along the years. The thing is that I never feel that I'm playing "vimgolf", or that I need to make an effort to remember key bindings. Maybe once I change some things or introduce new behavior it requires a period of adjustment, but for the vast majority of time the actions I need to take to produce an effect are ingrained in my muscle memory. E.g. I don't actively think "how do I select the text between parenthesis", and typing `vi)` just happens automatically with little mental effort. I'm sure it's the same for you and anyone who's used Vim for a while. In contrast, it's not possible to achieve this with mouse input. You will always have to consciously think about the action you want to take and manipulate the mouse to achieve it. More importantly, this action will always be imprecise given the analog nature of the input, so you might misclick and cause unintended behavior. Additionally, it takes your hands away from the keyboard which you're already using for making content changes. I'm a big fan of the ThinkPad Trackpoint for this reason, but even that is not a perfect solution. All of this combined means that it requires much more effort from the user, to the point where it's personally unbearable every time I've tried it. Both Vim and Emacs support mouse input as well, but I never rely on it for this reason. > The best way to approach acme is NOT to think of it as a text editor, but rather think if it as a replacement for your terminal. That's interesting. I kind of don't want that, though. Just like with my editors, I've invested a lot of time and effort to customize my terminal as well. It also has custom key bindings and configuration, and is deeply integrated into my workflow. Emacs, for example, supports embedding terminals and many different shells. I can see the benefit of having better integration with the editor, but all these solutions have some shortcomings that make them inferior to using a standalone terminal IME. I also prefer the Unix philosophy of using smaller tools that do one thing well, and combining them to fit my workflow. Repurposing my editor for all my tasks doesn't gel nicely with that, otherwise I would be using an IDE. :) > Basically, try it. It's so different, it's hard to get across in just words. It's like smalltalk - you have to try it to really get it. Thanks. I've tried Acme a few times over the years, but not extensively, precisely because I get frustrated fairly quickly... I'll give Anvil or acme2k a more serious attempt. But then again, this is all based on personal preferences anyway, so I'm fine with accepting these editors are just not for me. Cheers for the chat! |