I'd just take a look at some patches out there. There's a lot of usability tweaks existing for acme.

however I still think acme is a conflagration of confusion. It has programs, inside of it, it's a text editor, a terminal, but breaks the interface of /dev/draw so it doesn't properly multiplex by rio.

Often stated, and I imagine to be true, acme was to be a full replacement for rio almost, but it ends up falling short of that.

I am not bothered by acme / rio issues, since I use acme on plan9port.

However, I have been maintaining a set of patches, including up/down and additional goodies such as bindings for save, copy, cut, paste. Some of them are actually hard coded for Mac (cmd modifier), but not for Linux. It’s workable.

The golang port, edwood, features the same limitations, in my opinion.

People frequently say this sort of thing, but it's so rare for me to want to move precisely one line up--more usually, I want to move N lines up and M characters over. By the time I've mashed the arrow keys (or hjkl) enough to get there, I could have just as easily grabbed the mouse. Of course editors like vi and emacs have much more powerful movement capabilities, but those aren't "classic left-down-up-right".

What I'd probably most appreciate in Acme is a shortcut equivalent to / in vi, for those situations where I can see a bit of text I want to get to and it'd just be faster to hit (hypothetically) Ctrl-J and type a few characters vs grabbing the mouse. But I don't miss it often enough to go hacking the source :)

Being also a vim user, I prefer the arrow keys to the idiomatic hjkl, for anything within a “block” or paragraph. If further away, I would probably “/“ too sh

Maybe I am an incorrigible arrow addict !

There’s a patch to jump to the bar from the text using a keychord, to type and right click, as an alternative to “/“.

I’ve never tried it, but always kind of assumed such basic keystrokes just worked as expected. Now I know I shouldn’t bother with it.

Left and right work as expected. Up and down scroll.

Left and right already works.

Up and down can't work, because acme was designed for proportional fonts, and many of us acme users use proportional fonts. Up and down are not well defined/not useful with proportional fonts.

> Up and down can't work, because acme was designed for proportional fonts, and many of us acme users use proportional fonts. Up and down are not well defined/not useful with proportional fonts.

It can work with proportional fonts. Word for instance defines it well enough to be useful. Rather than down taking you to the same column on the next line, it just takes you to the character rendered at a similar x coordinate on the next line.

And this is useful when writing code how?

I'd use such a feature if I had to fill a table, and wanted to move to the same column on a different row. But with proportional fonts, the columns don't line up. So yes, it can move to the same x coordinate, but why is this useful?

> And this is useful when writing code how?

It's useful for general text navigation, and writing code is an instance of that.

> I'd use such a feature if I had to fill a table, and wanted to move to the same column on a different row. But with proportional fonts, the columns don't line up. So yes, it can move to the same x coordinate, but why is this useful?

"Doesn't work well for use case X" != "not useful [in general]"

If your text is laid out assuming fixed-width fonts, and it's important for you to move to the same column in a different row, then just use fixed-width fonts and the method I described would work as you expect.

Word processors use up/down keys to move up/down one line, at the same index, or the beginning or the end of the previous ‘ next line, if they exist. It can work.

Acme is opinionated and it’s a good thing if it fits its userbase. I am actually quite fond of many design decisions and maintain patches to workaround defaults that could drive me insane.

My personal feeling is negative on this matter, just as if I would need to reach to the mouse to delete a character. Up and down mapped to something like page up / page down feels as infuriating as those website that hijack scroll and back button.

Up and down works just fine in just about every word processor out there, using proportional fonts.