"It was all just text. Why did you need another application for it? Why should only the shell prompt be editable? Why can’t I move my cursor up a few lines to where the last command spewed out its results? All these problems simply disappear when your shell (or shells) simply becomes another Emacs buffer, upon which all of the text manipulation power of Emacs can be brought to bear."
That's definitely a great failing, but I think it has two greater still: not being written in Lisp, and being written in JavaScript.
The former could be overcome (Alpha was an amazing editor for the Mac written in TCL), and after all there are plenty of great programmes not written in Lisp (emacs, for example, has a C core …).
But JavaScript‽ JavaScript: there's got to be a better way. JavaScript: warn your friends about it. JavaScript: dissatisfaction guaranteed.
UNIX as an IDE never truly made sense until I discovered Acme. It was truly a zen-like experience.
Try sshfs :) Surprising that someone who has tried Plan 9 hasn't come to love specialized filesystems!
But as I've asked elsewhere, does acme have the ability to send text to an external repl on systems other than plan9 (a continuously running one, not a freshly-spawned one), preferably one running in another terminal window? Does it have indentation for Lisp? does it have syntax highlighting (not necessary, but handy)? does it have colorscheme customization (you'd be surprised how many programs generate illegible text in white-on-black terminals, and I've become quite fond of Solarized)? Can it look up documentation for the functions I'm using (very handy at times)?
I've got the tools I'm used to, and they provide things that Acme never will for me. Maybe I'm not experiencing ultimate Unix Philosophy Zen. Maybe using the mouse is a bit more efficient. But at the end of the day, I'm here to edit text, and Emacs works in my environment, and has some pretty good tools for that.
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/mouse_vs._keyboard/ind...
Not sure what you mean, I do remote development all the time.
> and need a repl
Why do you need a lisp repl in sam? The unix shell is a repl too, and I use it in a separate terminal, which talks to sam via the Plan 9 plumber.
I use multiple terminals and sometimes even multiple sam instances, and I consider this a big plus, rather than doing everything through a single program.
> autoindent
Sam supports autoindent just fine. But perhaps you mean some other form of "smart" indent though.
You're right that sam (and acme) don't have features. The functionality comes from programs interacting with each other through the plumber or some other method.
As I'm running a Unix (Linux, at present), I really don't have the full power of the plumber at my disposal.
As for autoindent, I was talking about Lisp code, which most autoindenters don't indent properly. This is one of several reasons that the original vi had a dedicated mode for editing lisp code. Yes, really. You can look it up.
Anyways, I'm an emacs user. Saying we do everything through one program is like saying that every Smalltalk program is the same: we do everything through one VM. It's not as elegant, true, but it works right now. And outside of plan 9, acme and sam are a little hit and miss by comparison.
(ducks)
(runs)
(dodges)
:-)
...Well, this is clearly a Vim user. If you're never leaving Emacs, and you're writing plugins to do everything inside it, you're using Emacs exactly as intended.