okay I figured it out: left and right click do things differently than I expected. not right or wrong, just... different.
this window manager is for the birds so far though man. I've been a tiling WM guy for well over a decade and this literally, physically, hurts (I have the trackball module installed, so this "right click and hold while dragging to create term windows" thing is a dance)
the mouse working in acme is kinda cool, and it does a solid job of trying to preview files when I click on them. what I can't figure out so far (I'm gonna have to find the man pages, somewhere) is how to write and save a new file. I have, however, gotten this terminal into a very wild state: