On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 08:42:54PM +0100, Charles Forsyth wrote: > > Any experienced acme user will quickly start banging the desk in > frustration if thrown back into sam. > Incredibly clumsy by comparison; not fluid. sam -d is useful for certain > types of scripting.
This is tantamount to saying acme is superior because you are better at acme. While this is a valid method of choosing the tools you personally use, it's not much good to people who are trying to figure out how these sorts of opinions get formed in the first place. Sam is a legitimate step forward in the world of text editing; its command language and approach to regex is very powerful and allows interesting applications. Samterm has quirks and things that need fixing -- its scrolling mechanism has been suggested for use as a csprng -- but there's always the ability to fix or replace the interface. With acme, there is nothing *but* the interface. Acme is not a text editor; it is a second-system dumpster fire shoehorned into an incompatible interface. Because it overlaps so greatly with rio, lots of code requires special-casing the acme environment. It's pretty clear from looking at the code that acme was eventually aiming to replace rio entirely. I will never know (and am uninterested in) the reason this was not completed, but the current state of it is hacky and gross. In addition, Acme as an interface represents a complete reversal of previous 'window systems should be transparent' approaches taken. Acme does not allow you to do things with your computer so much as it requires you to do things *to* your computer. It requires fiddling. This approach is fine for some, but others of us just want to edit a damn text file once in a while. Acme is firmly with X Windows in the "huge programs that don't actually *do* anything for you" category. khm
