Introduction to the Sam Text Editor | Hacker News Reader

Introduction to the Sam Text Editor

blog.matthewdmiller.net

102 pointsnaetius14 comments

I'll be the guy who brings vim and emacs into another editor's story. Sorry for this, I will try sam and vis for sure though.

I recently moved to emacs after 20 years of vim. It is my fifth try with emacs, the other trials ended in weeks. This time I was motivated by emacs excelent support for LSP which I wanted for Go. I use Doom Emacs which is a lot better than Spacemacs in my opinion. After only 1 hour my Go experience was already a lot better than with simple vim. After a few days I started using workspaces. Then magit. After that I dived into Org mode and was blown away. Moved everything from vimwiki to that. With syncthing and orgzly I have everything on my android as well and replaced google keep with that.

Point is: if you are a vim user give emacs another try. Doom is mature enough imho. I will still use vim on servers. I still use vim in emacs evil so all my years investment still pays off. But for my personal workstation emacs is just wow. Nowhere near as fast as vim but the added features are worth the perfomance hit.

> I use Doom Emacs which is a lot better than Spacemacs in my opinion.

Can you explain why? I use Spacemacs (and like it) but have always been curious about Doom Emacs.

> This time I was motivated by emacs excelent support for LSP which I wanted for Go.

Neovim has built in support for LSP. I'm guessing Neovim's support for LSP is also very good by now. You have been using the original Vim?

> Nowhere near as fast as vim but the added features are worth the perfomance hit.

Are you comparing Vim with emacs-27 or earlier? Or are you comparing Vim with the unreleased (but still very usable) Emacs 28? Emacs 28 is a bit more zippy due to the native elisp compiler. I think you will be pleased with the performance boost!

Doom vs Spacemacs - I found more bugs and performance issues in Spacemacs. I encountered a few errors in Doom as well but nothing serious. Doom was a lot quicker to set up as well.

I have been using original Vim.

I use Emacs 27 from Debian stable. Will look into 28, thank you.

> if you are a vim user give emacs another try.

Same here. I'm a 8 years vim user and switched to emacs last year, I would recommend the same thing. IMO Emacs is much more powerful and customizable than vim, and evil brings almost everything I need in vim to emacs.

I’m a Vim user who finds the ideas and promise of Emacs intriguing. The reason I don’t switch is your comment about performance, which is echoed by everyone who has used both editors extensively. I’m in Vim all day. A performance hit would hurt. I need my editor to be fast.

I'd recommend a batteries-included Emacs distro like Doom to try out. That way, you don't spend a lot of time customising the editor before getting invested.

Vanilla Emacs is plenty fast, but Doom will give you a closer to real world use case, with themes, LSP, Magit and other essentials built in.

IMHO, using spacemacs and doom-emacs (tried both) you're not really trying Emacs because you're using vim shortcuts (that I love, I'm a vim addicted) on top of Emacs infrastructure, nothing bad with this approach, but definitely you're not having an full Emacs experience. I like doom-emacs, do no use it simply because I do not like distribution for text editors (prelude, spacemacs, doom-emacs and so on).

I learned about sam's structural regular expressions after learning about vis[1] on a post in this website. It aims to combine the modal text editing from vi(m) and sam's structural regular expressions, plus some cool stuff like multiple cursors or a Lua API.

I feel more comfortable with it than sam's given than I'm not as much as a mouse person but a keyboard person (even though being a graphic designer). It's development is not as heavy as is stuff like neovim or kakoune, but still at this very moment I find it usable, quick and reliable.

[1] https://github.com/martanne/vis

   tar xzf vis-0.7.tar.gz
   cat vis-0.7/doc/requirements.txt

   breathe

Interesting name choice. If I am not mistaken, BSD has had a vis(1) utility since 1993.

http://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/src/usr.bin/...

Correct. On OpenBSD, the vis editor's binary is actually called `vise` to avoid this conflict.

Hmm. Recently I started writing a simple vim-style text editor from scratch because, to support some weird ideas I have, I need a text editor built on a piece table. And it turns out vis is built on a piece table...

another plan9+vi mashup in the opposite direction to vis:

http://c9x.me/edit/

I really enjoyed reading this, thank you for sharing. Love the screenshots!

Thanks! I'm not the one who shared it here, but I'm the one who wrote the article. It was a blast to play around with Sam. I hope to play around with some other Plan 9 utilities as well.

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