This is the default plan9 editor. It's interesting but I hated the massive reliance on the mouse to do everything. The article even calls emacs "keyboard-intensive" like that's a bad thing

Same here. I'm too much of a keyboard guy (and Dvorak, at that), so I've just been admiring it from a distance, but it has some great ideas.

Sam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_%28text_editor%29) is also interesting, the vi to Acme's emacs, so to speak. Same with the various window managers styled after rio & 8 1/2, the filesystem, etc.

There is a clone for X-windows called "Wily" (http://www.cse.yorku.ca/~oz/wily/). I'm not sure if it is still actively developed -- the website hasn't changed much since the 90's. I used it for a while as my editor in the mid-90's. I liked the tiling window placement and the extensibility model: instead of building new functionality in an extension language (e.g. Emacs Lisp), you build it in external programs which interact via an RPC protocol. The biggest drawback is that you really need a 3-button mouse to effectively use Wily/Acme. Mouse-chords are to Acme/Wily as the control key is to Emacs.

This UI seems to be solving problems I don't have, and in a way I don't want.

When I'm coding, I don't want mail. Mail -- unless I'm waiting for a specific mail message -- is a distraction. I don't want to see the source code control system. That's yet another a distraction. I just want my code.

I want to focus on the code.

That's a source code editor and a (good) debugger and an application dump analyzer that work in unison. I want to focus on the creation of the code, or on the run-time behavior of the program itself, or on the test suite. Not the tools.

If my tools can't help my focus, they're not helping me.

Now if the development suite can (upon request) analyze my source code and suggest a better way to code something or can find and point to questionable code, or can flag coding errors or to vulnerabilities, then I'm interested.

looks great... gettin my hands on it for sure...