I think I’ve been a member of 9fans for its entire history. The earliest saved 9fans email in my /mail/box/bwc is dated 2001. But most of the time I have not said much. Given that the list isn’t very busy these days, and that I’m doing a lot of thinking about Plan 9, I thought I would post some of my seemingly random musings.
Today I’m thinking about Plan 9’s interfaces. The reason for thinking about those is that I’ve just switch back to sam(1) from acme(1). No real reason, except for the old adage, a change is as good as a rest. I’ve been working 10 to 12 hour days, six days a week lately. I just wanted to change things a bit. Nothing against acme. I’ve been using it for many years and it is a great tool. The one time that Ken Thompson visited my office, when I had an office in Redwood City, he noticed that I was using acme and made a comment to the effect that “you are one of those.” He uses sam as do many of the folks who created Plan 9. Many of the original folks also use acme. I had did a poll years ago but can’t seem to find the results. As did I for many years, even after acme make its appearance. I had gotten a version of it working on my Unix using an Teletype 630 terminal, downloading the samterm and all. It was the main Plan 9 editor during my very brief tenure at Bell Labs in 1990. Acme came after I left with the arrival of Phil Winterbottom and his Alef language. The window manager was 8 1/2, which is like rio(1) without the bumpers one can use to move and resize the window. I must say that it is refreshing to be back with the older editor. I did have modify rio to look for an environmental variable that tells it not to do acme chording. I kept trying to use chording in sam and realized that part of the problem was that I could still use it in rio. So, I added a shell variable that turned that feature of rio off. After that subconscious chording stopped. I don’t think that sam is better than acme, or even the other way around. Both do a good job of getting the job done. They are different. And that difference has an affect on the way one used the system. When I use acme, I mostly stay in acme, using the win program for my shell access. It becomes a kind of integrated environment. With sam, I seem to use tools like sed and awk in the rio windows, like sed and awk more than when I was using acme. I had a similar thing happen when in the 1980’s I dropped vi for ed. I used ed until the 1990’s when I was able to switch to sam full time. But my use of edit commands in sam is the biggest difference between it and acme. In sam, I think more about how to modify things using the command window rather than moving the mouse around and clicking on things. The command language in acme using the Edit command is the same, but somehow it feels different. There is something to be said for the convenience of the command windows in sam. If I thought of the change as an experiment, one result would be the time it took me to not have to think about which editor I was using while working. Our tools should be, for the most part, transparent. It took about a week to switch back to sam from acme. That time is certainly a function of how much I used sam in the past. I’m very grateful to still be using these tools. It’s a very personal thing but for someone who first used 6th Edition Unix, ed and the old shell, and used all the versions of Unix that followed, these tools, both acme and sam, rio and 8 1/2, are an improvement to all that proceeded them and followed them. Brantley Coile
