Yesterday someone asked me how come the two 24" monitors on my desk @ work were turned off and I was using the laptop exclusively. Apart from having to be in meetings, the main reason is that acme on a hires "retina" display is more than good enough for programming. I still switch to vi for certain things (mainly because vi has become "transparent" through decades of use). And occasionally notepad for Unicode requiring complex text layout. 3-4 column layout in acme works about right for me.
> On Sep 1, 2016, at 7:42 AM, Brantley Coile <brantleyco...@me.com> wrote: > > 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 > >
