The advantage of Acme is that there isn't much learning: all the commands are obvious (eg Put writes back to disk), but you do have to learn the mouse clicks to execute them.
I use sed's language constantly, and look forward to expanding my bag of tricks with sam. Stream editors are without-a-doubt the most useful tool I have for editing files, because I can write scripts that edit them for me. I found that sam had a limiting command-line interface, so I wrote a script around it (ssam) that gives at a more sed-like stream-editing interface: -e accepts a (series of) sam commands; -f accepts the name of a file with sam commands; and you can pipe in the text you want to change, then use -e or -f to supply the commands. It puts all the text it changes on standard output. It's in code-review right now, so if you use it let me know (-G sends a gripe with mail) if it doesn't work well for you. http://codereview.appspot.com/95076/diff/1/2 Jason Catena
