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Comment by prakash | Hacker News Reader

What's sam?

It's a text editor that I first used on plan9. I tried it out in the 90s, and I didn't "get it" back then, but I kind of liked Sam.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_%28text_editor%29

I'm a self-described operating system junkie. At home, I've got WinXP, Win7, OpenBSD, OS X, Haiku (BeOS), FreeBSD, Solaris, AIX, and a few Linux flavors running. Yes, all at once. Maybe I should try plan9 again in a VM.

Which do find yourself using the most often?

Currently, my most powerful machine is my MacBook, which dual-boots OS X and Windows 7 natively. I probably use them about the same. I run a lot of things in VirtualBox, though. I almost always have an OpenBSD VM up and running, for example. My two lower-powered desktops are running Solaris 10 (Sparc) and Ubuntu Karmic for the time being, but Ubuntu is kind of in the dog house right now. I've had good luck with ArchLinux in a VM, so I may throw that on there soon.

It is like ed(1) with a windowing system.

The standard editor!

I want a editor! Not a samitor or an emacsitor or a viditor!

Those aren't even words.

This is superficially true but I think ignores how usable sam is. The rationalized command language, the fact that you can see what you're doing, unlimited undo even across files (even across file I/O), and the ability to go to the file in question and just type make it a much more satisfying experience to do large amounts of development with than ed is.

Yes. Vi is also not too dissimilar to ed, but much more useful. (Also NetHack is quite similar to Vi, and much more useful and fun in turn.)

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