Extra ways to do the same thing is the enemy of simplicity and orthogonality. A major reason Plan 9 and Inferno are so small (the plan9port layer is 51.7MB source, the Inferno VM OS is 51.6MB source), and easier to grasp in one person's mind, is that the old Unix guys ruthlessly stripped out extra ways of getting things done, and made sure they ways that were left played well with each other. I keep a much smaller working set of unixy information in my head, while working daily with Acme and Inferno's userland, than I had to using Solaris or Linux and vi or Emacs.
The way I work in Acme, commands (whether built-in or my own) are presented in front of me for execution, so I edit and highlight and execute them. I don't take time out of thinking about code to think about the magical key combinations that do whatever. So it's more muscle memory to commands on the screen and sight recognition than remembering keystrokes. I do recall that many of my Emacs commands were muscle memory, but the more I wanted to use, the harder it was to remember them all. I lost them quickly when I stopped using emacs. Years from now the commands I used to manipulate files in a given directory will still be there in the guide file, waiting for me to run them without error. (I help this along by directory-specific logging of interesting commands.)
I was especially happy to get away from the hundreds of extra options in the GNU tools userland, which made entire other tools obsolete (e.g., sort -u obsoletes uniq, except when you need to uniq -c or uniq -d). All these options are the enemy of clarity in code, so you can more confidently write portable, straightforward scripts, go back to them later and actually read them.
> Extra ways to do the same thing is the enemy of simplicity and orthogonality.
Adding support for moving the cursor with the arrow keys would not involve a very high amount of complexity. I found that Acme required me too much to just let Rob Pike dictate how I should work rather than providing a tool that I can customize to my habits and my needs.
Hey, don't get me wrong, I'm as turned off by Rob Pike's dismissal of everything not in his vision as the next 9fan or gonut. It took me forever to really efficiently use Acme, and no generics means no Go for me, since it's ridiculous to not have map, fold, and filter at your disposal once you've used it in other languages like Haskell, Python, even Perl or the shell. But what's great about his tools is that if you do let them creep into you, your daily practice gets much better because the weight of the environment doesn't slow you down so much.
The way I work in Acme, commands (whether built-in or my own) are presented in front of me for execution, so I edit and highlight and execute them. I don't take time out of thinking about code to think about the magical key combinations that do whatever. So it's more muscle memory to commands on the screen and sight recognition than remembering keystrokes. I do recall that many of my Emacs commands were muscle memory, but the more I wanted to use, the harder it was to remember them all. I lost them quickly when I stopped using emacs. Years from now the commands I used to manipulate files in a given directory will still be there in the guide file, waiting for me to run them without error. (I help this along by directory-specific logging of interesting commands.)
I was especially happy to get away from the hundreds of extra options in the GNU tools userland, which made entire other tools obsolete (e.g., sort -u obsoletes uniq, except when you need to uniq -c or uniq -d). All these options are the enemy of clarity in code, so you can more confidently write portable, straightforward scripts, go back to them later and actually read them.