plan9port VS qtcurve

Acme is genuinely worth trying, you can run it on Linux/Mac without a VM [1]. I'm pretty sure Russ Cox [2] and Rob Pike use it as their daily driver which is insane because it doesn't even have syntax highlighting. I used it for years when I was in school as an exercise in masochism, but I learned a lot about Unix, and the mouse-driven workflow actually grew on me.

[1]: https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/

[2] https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/

If you find it too complicated and closely tied to Go internals, you can also check out Plan 9 from User Space's version, which is itself based on libthread from Plan 9 starting from 3rd edition, which is itself based on Alef's implementation of channels (Alef is Go's grandfather).

I tried plan9port's mk for a moment out of curiosity. I quickly ran into an annoying usability problem: it compares file mtimes with second accuracy.

https://github.com/9fans/plan9port/blob/cc4571fec67407652b03...

With sub-second build times for individual targets, this causes mk to needlessly recompile files because the target may have the same mtime as the prerequisites.

Not OP, but what about something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metisse ?

( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt3q7Z7RjIU 4min54sec)

Which begat https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1166253.1166301 from the same institution. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUUtiOWTzz4 7min20sec)

Married with something like https://arcan-fe.com/about/

With some https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface sprinkled in,

not necessarily in the 'style' of https://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/ but the concept.

Rounded with something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenQwaq , or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cobalt

OFC fully themable like GTK before they broke it, or something like https://github.com/KDE/qtcurve which is endlessly modifiable.

Nirvana!

Well, there's the legendary QtCurve. Don't know why it is not longer included in the default KDE install, or if it even can be used in KDE5, though.