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Comment by gchpaco | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

"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.

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