Acme vs Terminal UI
アクメ・インターフェース / ターミナルUI
Acme comes from Platform Screen Languages and Terminal UI from UI Expression. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Acme
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Acme is the interface Rob Pike described in a 1994 paper, a hybrid of window system, shell and editor. It has no icons and no pop-up or pull-down menus; any string anywhere on screen can be executed with the middle button or opened with the right one. Windows are stacked in columns, and each is only a one line tag above a body.
Terminal UI
The terminal look: monospaced phosphor characters on black. The VT100's green afterglow became the primal image of the computer's face, repeated from hacker cinema to modern CLI tools.
| Acme | Terminal UI | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1994– | 1970s– |
| Family | Platform Screen Languages | UI Expression |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Windows are stacked in columns, and each window is just a one line tag above a body / The scroll bar sits at the left edge of the body, and nothing sits at the right / Sweeping a string with the middle button underlines it only while the button is held / The body is pale yellow and the tag pale blue, and there is not one button or icon to click | Single phosphor color on black / The monospace grid / A blinking cursor / Scanlines and glow |
| Best used for | When a working screen should stop gaining widgets and let every place you can type hold a command · When a development environment is meant to be extended by users typing commands into the tag themselves | Developer tools packing state and next steps into one monospaced screen · Staging technical hardness or secrecy as the look of an interface |
| Type | One typeface, one size. No bold and no coloured text; state is shown by an underline and by inverted selection only. | One monospaced face where emphasis comes from weight and inversion alone |
| Composition | Split the screen into columns and stack windows inside them. Each window is a one line tag above a body. Take no margin, and separate neighbours with a single thin rule. | Everything on the column and row grid, blocks separated by blank lines |
| Material | Two ground colours only: pale yellow for the body, pale blue for the tag, black for the text. Underline execution in dark red and reference in dark green, and fill the centre of the small square at the left of the tag when the file has been modified. | One phosphor hue on black with scanlines and bloom added sparingly |
| Caution | Copy the look and turn the tag into a fixed menu, and you lose the actual mechanism, which is that any string at all can be a command. | Heavy scanlines and flicker cost legibility and the atmosphere ends up beating the speed that made the tool worth using. |