modern text editor similar to acme

Question

After using vi for the better part of 15 years, I tried Rob Pike's Acme on a whim while working with Go. I really enjoyed how minimal and lightweight it is. Modern unix-esque things don't really behave well in Acme and Ruby development is irritating at best in that environment (it works beautifully with Go and C, however).

I've adapted to some of Acme's "features" in vim, but I'm groping for options right now. Are there any text editors with the following (somewhat subjective) features and not much else?

• no syntax highlighting or line numbers
• runs on osx and maybe linux
• buffers/window splitting
• light background, dark foreground (or the ability to change this)
• little to no bloat
• ability to run open a terminal in the editor or run commands from it

I don't know of any editor that can give me Acme's mouse support, but I'm using a magic trackpad these days, so that's not necessary. I've tried Sublime, but it feels a little bloated and splitting windows yields wasted space. Fullscreen mode comes close to what I'm looking for, but I can't put my finger on what's missing. Sublime might work if I could open a terminal in the window as well.

My current environment is iTerm2 full screen, utilizing vim for code editing. This works relatively well, but using the mouse would be handy. A huge motivator for my search is that Aqua wastes so much space with window borders/shadows and there isn't a sufficient tiling window manager available for OSX.

Answer 1

I'm not aware of any "modern" editor mimicking Acme but everything you ask for is in Vim and Emacs but they are probably not what you might call "modern" and their operation is diametrally opposed to that of Acme.

The last item in your list is easier and more natural in Emacs than in Vim, though.

I understand that you want a GUI editor but you seem to complain about Mac OS X's window management. I have the impression that you would be at ease in a real tiled desktop environment. Did you try Awesome or WMII or others?

Lastly, you can use the mouse for cursor positionning, visual selection, window focus and clicking on tabs in Vim, just set mouse=a in your ~/.vimrc.

Beside the very special stuff I've seen done with the mouse in Acme, I think that eveything you want is there: