Thanks to Brantley for his thoughtful musings. Me, I love many things about Sam, but I just can't use it as my everyday editor. The structural regular expression stuff is a work of genius, but I still find, such are my limitations, that the user interface is just too clunky and retro.
On 2 September 2016 at 02:42, 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 > > >
