Wow, just running GUI Emacs is so much easier.

Did you mean counsel-compile?

I should try that!

I use it in all buffers whose major mode is derived from text-mode.

By default undo does work in the scratch buffer so it is something in your configuration that is keeping this from working. As a quick way to check, try running emacs -q, which skips loading your configuration, and see if you have undo in the scratch buffer there; if so, it’s definitely something you have in you configuration.

You can bisect your configuration to figure out how you are deactivating undo. You can do this manually or with the help of the bug-hunter package.

Acme doesn’t stand for some generic editor! It’s the famous acme text editor by Rob Pike. It’s an interesting editor, very different from Emacs or Vim, and yes, very mousey. In this video Russ Cox gives a great overview: https://youtu.be/dP1xVpMPn8M

Blatant advertising for one of my packages: Embark has convenient key bindings for all of the commands discussed in this article. If point is on active region and you call embark-act, the s prefix has all of the sort commands there, reverse-region is on r, and delete-duplicate-lines is on d. I tend to forget all the sort commands, so I often call embark-act on a region, press s, and then C-h to get a list of them.