Using the sam Editor
The sam editor is a text editor written by some of the same people that created UNIX, including Ken Thompson and Bob Pike. Many of them worked previously on the AT&T Labs (the lab has mostly been disbanded, but many of these guys still work for other companies).
The sam editor provides many of the same features found on a previous editor, called ed (also known as the standard UNIX editor).
If you know enough about UNIX to understand what ed is, you may be asking me: why are people still bothering with concepts related to a line oriented editor? This is a program that was superseded decades ago by vi, wasn’t it? (In fact, I know that the Emacs crowd will additionally say that Emacs superseded vi, to which I reply that vim superseded Emacs…)
But the truth is, for old fashioned as ed may be, it still has some ideas that are interesting exploring. First, ed was born at a time when there was no easy way to interact with a screen of text. Therefore, it had to create a mini-language that allowed people to efficiently enter text without a mouse or other form or cursor.
For example, using ed one can easily say: go to the next line (in a C source file) that has a declaration of an integer, and add a new variable at the end of the line.
For the ones among you that never tried this, here are the commands:
/int s/;/, newVar;/
Here is what this means: “/int ” will search for a line that has the “int” keyword on it (notice that I added a blank after “int”). Then, substitute the character “;” by the sequence “, newVar;”.
Effectively, the previous commands use search and replace to edit text.
If you use vi, you will notice that several of these commands have resemblance on existing vi commands. That is because vi was designed as a full screen version of ed. For example, the file access operations are still the same. Also, virtually all commands supported by ed can be accessed in the so-called “ex” mode (ex is usually just another name for ed).
For users experienced in ed, one advantage of using it is that there is no need to use anything other than the keyboard. Also, movements are done by search patterns or direct line references, which are typically much faster than using a mouse (or arrow keys, for that matter).
Of course, there is something missing in ed, which is the possibility of seeing the whole file. You can always use an external program, such as more (or less), but this is somewhat awkward.
The sam editor takes the concept of ed one step further, but in a different direction than vi. It also provides a graphical UI, but instead of relying on two modes of operations as vi, sam provides an improved set of commands to ed, along with a way of entering and viewing the results of these commands.
The result is an editor that is refreshingly different, while providing the same power of the commands available in vi and ed. For advanced users, sam may be an additional tool that can be used whenever the strong features of the editor are required.
Of course, sam is the main editor for plan9, so people using it are already used to the conciseness of sam. There is just a small set of commands, which can be learned in a few hours. The combination of these commands is what provides the flexibility of its approach.
The UI is divided into a number of windows. One of them is the command window, where editing commands are typed. The interesting thing is that the command buffer has all the features of a normal window, like autoindent, for example. Thus, adding and editing text through the command window is as comfortable as using any other editor window.
Although sam provides a lot of nice features, it is not as widely used as Vim or Emacs. Therefore, it has some rough spots, specially in the UI (the most GUI (the most difficult part to get right). The fact that it was developed for plan9, instead of UNIX, also brings some difficulties. However, despite these issues I
However, despite these issues, I have found sam to be very easy to learn and use. It has already become one of my favorite text editors.
Further Reading
Inferno Programming with Limbo is an introduction to the main operating system based on plan9. It will give you some idea of what the environment is, and why it is radically different from other OSs.
Learning the UNIX OS talks about several original UNIX commands, including ed.
Similar Posts:
About the Author
Carlos Oliveira holds a PhD in Systems Engineering and Optimization from University of Florida. He works as a software engineer, with more than 10 years of experience in developing high performance, commercial and scientific applications in C++, Java, and Objective-C. His most Recent Book is Practical C++ Financial Programming.
