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Comment by dramaticus3 | Hacker News Reader

> A sampling of more advanced tricks

I don't do tricks.

I agree. I know my view is very unpopular here, but I really don't think an editor that requires that massive block of text to understand is good. I used vi (not vim) for at least 10 years. The power of ed is what makes vi powerful, but if that's all I care about, I could just use ed (especially Plan9's ed which is more GUI than your old ed).

I switched a couple of years ago to acme (http://acme.cat-v.org) and sam (http://sam.cat-v.org). Sam is a graphical version of ed, just like vi is supposed to be but for me sam is better. It's really GUI (unlike gvim which is GUI patch on vim) and it does everything a modern ed (from Plan9) does and much more (structured regular expressions).

Both editors were designed by Rob Pike and are used today by key UNIX/C figures like Ken Thompson, Bjarne Stroustrup, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan.

All things considered, I'd still take vi(m)? over emacs anytime :-).

Funny you should say that. The screenshot here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor) is my screen

ed (especially Plan9's ed which is more GUI than your old ed).

'More GUI' because it added the b[rowse] command [1]? That's a bit of a stretch!

[1] http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/1/ed

Perhaps he means Sam, which is a kind of GUI ed

Ah, no, sorry. It's more GUI because Plan9 terminals allow editing everything on screen. So I can type my text in ed and then use my mouse to position the cursor somewhere up, select text, and make a change.

Perhaps I should have phrased it differently, if all I cared about was ed commands I could have used Plan9's ed in conjunction with a plan9 terminal, like 9term.

In UNIX I use plan9port which has a port of ed, and 9term, a terminal that acts like a Plan9 terminal.

> So I can type my text in ed and then use my mouse to position the cursor somewhere up, select text, and make a change.

No you can't, not in ed on Plan9.

Sure you can. Turn on rio's hold mode.

Yes you can type away all you like but ed only reads commands from the prompt, just like a line orientated terminal.

You cannot unread what was already read but with hold mode you can have a two-dimensional view of what you type and edit it at any point that wasn't read yet, that means since you started hold mode.

> Even when there are newlines in the output text, 9term will not honor reads if the window is in hold mode [...] Some programs automatically turn on hold mode to simplify the editing of multi-line text; type ESC when done to allow mail to read the text.

"I really don't think an editor that requires that massive block of text to understand is good."

Isn't that a bit disingenuous? From what it sounds like, you were probably able to become quickly proficient with sam and acme because you were experienced with vi and ed.

It doesn't look like those editors are without any need for documentation. http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/sam/

You don't need to know ed command language and regular expressions to use sam or acme. All you need is a mouse. Knowing them would make a huge productivity boost but you can start using them gradually.

Yes, you need documentation. How much though? I'd say very very little compared to traditional editors.

It's a matter of taste. Many people here prefer to use the mouse as little as possible, and from what I understand, that's not the direction sam has taken.

Exactly, mouse usage is pretty much required in Sam and Acme (and Plan9).

Count me among the "no mouse" people. I'm a touch typist, and constantly moving my right hand back and forth to the mouse just slows everything down to an unacceptable degree.

I bet you do, though - my experience of learning anything to a reasonable depth has been that I developed short-cut ways of doing things that are necessary but laborious to a beginner.

Maybe vi has a higher-than-average density of tricks due to its steep learning curve, but once you know them it's very capable.

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