But, in any case, I find this beautiful because not a single line is wasted on anything that isn't text, yet I can easily see what is what without it hurting my eyes.
I haven't had the time to give Acme a proper try myself, so who knows whether I'd hate it or love it or what, but it only took a few minutes of Russ Cox's little introduction video [1] on Acme for me to go, "Whoa, that is unique"; half the concepts gave me a near-instant visceral feeling of simultaneously being disturbed yet also somehow delighted.
I am really unhappy with the direction of modern UI design, and much of software in general, but sometimes I wonder how much of my feelings are truly objective, how much is my own bias, and how I would feel if I grew up in a totally different environment with different stuff. I've kind of always been curious in that sense, if you took a group of people who somehow had been totally isolated from not only computers and software, but our various cultural biases, what would they find to be the most intuitive, and what sort of things would they come up with?
In a similar sense, for better or for worse, that is almost how I felt seeing Russ use Acme; it looked like an editor built by aliens for other gremlin-like aliens.
I can't confirm or deny whether the aliens are right about their editing paradigm, but it is at least something much closer to "transcending the way we write (ascii) text" than most, and so it's cool to see Anvil is at least drawing inspiration from that rather than, say, yet another VS Code.