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Comment by scarmig | Hacker News Reader

Let me know when they release a decent editor for it...

As gchpaco points out, both sam and acme are pretty usable. Acme makes a good enough programming editor that I use it for all my coding at work, while I keep a tarball of the original sam port on a server for those times when I have to use a system with a crappy version of vi and no admin privileges to install something better.

Oh, and you can run Vim on Plan 9 now. But it's kind of like visiting a foreign country and eating only McDonalds.

I used emacs for 11 years (93-04) and then acme-like editors (wily, plan9port acme, Acme SAC, Inferno acme) for 8 years (04-). Acme (especially guide files) made a distinct and pervasive change to my working style that emacs never did: sped me up, prevented me from forgetting, gave me help just when I need it, and reduced errors. Inferno's VM gave me a minimal unix environment whose executable and my scripts I can take via usb to clients' machines.

Is there any articles about workflow/philosophy of sam ? I recall stumbling upon few videos, too introductory to be interesting compared to the emacs/vim-fu we're used too nowadays.

http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/sam/ reproduces the original paper by Rob Pike, which goes into some detail, and at length. http://sam.cat-v.org/ collects links to sam implementations, papers, and paraphernalia (such as ssam, which I originally wrote with Russ Cox). To better learn sam in a workaday role, figure out why the sam idioms at http://sam.cat-v.org/cheatsheet/ work (I have Acme versions of many of these at https://raw.github.com/catenate/acme-fonts/master/test/1/acm...).

Sam and acme are both very good; they're weird, certainly, and very different from editors before and since but they are quite nice to work in. At least the equal of vi.

I tried very seriously to use Sam instead of vi. My main criticism of it is that you have to be a pixel-perfect mouse acrobat to use it efficiently. I'm not pixel-perfect. I couldn't use the graphical parts of Sam, and that kind of negated all the rest of it. It did have some very interesting (to me, as a programmer) ways of doing things, including structural regular expressions.

"My main criticism of it is that you have to be a pixel-perfect mouse acrobat to use it efficiently."

That was my major complaint about Plan 9 in general. As far as I could tell, it really wanted me to run with a one-handed keyboard and mouse.

...that plus the fact that Bell Labs invented "Not Invented Here" Syndrome.

Sam and acme do away with almost all the cursor movement commands and keystrokes of other editors, and replaces them with the mouse (to move the cursor around, just point and click, simpler and faster) and structured regular expressions (to select text segments in a document, then run commands across just those). They even use mouse chords for common operations such as cut, paste, and run a command, which are so muscle-memory to me now they don't interrupt my stream of thought.

It is surprisingly demanding of mice; you need to have a three button mouse and ideally with a separate button, as chording on the mouse wheel can be error prone. I try to switch now and again but I never really stay; particularly with acme I find I like the way wily (a nominal clone) did the current working directory better; easier to create utility files.

But it is a really good editor, just not to my taste.

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