18 Jul
2025
18 Jul
'25
2:02 a.m.
I always recoiled from vi's plethora of commands. Then came sam, and I
haven't looked back since. It handles multiple windows with barely
more commands than ed, real regular expressions, good mouse support,
and great global editing capability. It can even run by script without
a screen.
Doug
18 Jul
18 Jul
5:07 a.m.
I often think about the old ad from Symbolics touting EMACS's "over 400
easy to use commands."
-ro
On Fri, Jul 18, 2025 at 12:27 PM Douglas McIlroy <
douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> wrote:
I always recoiled from vi's plethora of commands.
Then came sam, and I
haven't looked back since. It handles multiple windows with barely
more commands than ed, real regular expressions, good mouse support,
and great global editing capability. It can even run by script without
a screen.
Doug
10:46 a.m.
Once when I saw the Lisp machine EMACS help list scroll by, replete
with a "call elevator" command, I innocently asked how many commands
there were. I expected a prompt answer akin to help|wc. It actually
took two experts several minutes to come up with a way to count those
lines.
Doug
On Fri, Jul 18, 2025 at 1:07 AM Rob Pike <robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I often think about the old ad from Symbolics touting EMACS's "over 400 easy to
use commands."
-ro
On Fri, Jul 18, 2025 at 12:27 PM Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu>
wrote:
>
> I always recoiled from vi's plethora of commands. Then came sam, and I
> haven't looked back since. It handles multiple windows with barely
> more commands than ed, real regular expressions, good mouse support,
> and great global editing capability. It can even run by script without
> a screen.
>
> Doug
21 Jul
21 Jul
7:53 a.m.
I couldn't agree more. After I was exposed to 'sam' in 1987, there
was no other editor.
I was, however, heavily involved in the porting of 'pads' and 'pi'
to Solaris and Linux, and 'pads' has a 'move' operation, distinct
from 'resize/reshape'. I had sometimes felt the need of such an
operation when I had a large samterm open with lots of open files,
so, with no pretensions to originality, I took the code from 'pads'
and put it into 'samterm', and it was trivial to add. For which I
should perhaps apologize to the author of 'sam'.
On Fri, 18 Jul 2025 at 12:12, Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu>
wrote:
I always recoiled from vi's plethora of commands.
Then came sam, and I
haven't looked back since. It handles multiple windows with barely
more commands than ed, real regular expressions, good mouse support,
and great global editing capability. It can even run by script without
a screen.
Doug
1
days inactive
4
days old
3 comments
3 participants
participants (3)
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Douglas McIlroy -
Noel Hunt -
Rob Pike