I tried to switch to Sam a while back, because I liked the way it did regular expressions, and how it handled "lines" of text. Unfortunately, I found that you had to be a better/more accurate mouse user than I am. You really need to be pixel perfect to use Sam effectively.
Your preferred settings can be saved to the mouse's onboard memory, so you only have to install the programming crapware on one system.
But there aren’t many mice like these. Personally I picked up the N700 and it’s a fine enough mouse but I wouldn’t use it with any other system except some form of Plan 9 with Acme. Not my favorite.
My solution to _that_ is to just write text in Acme always and copy/paste it into the destination when I'm done :)
https://github.com/karahobny/acme2k
https://github.com/aarzilli/yacco
HTH
97 98 99 13 97 98 99
abc
abc
I now think that being able to interpret the same thing in many ways, and shift between them at will to use the most useful one or leverage a different tool, is a key skill in computing and programming which doesn't get discussed all that often. Vim uses it in letting you treat it as lines, words, sentences, paragraphs, blocks, screens. Regexes let you treat it as character sequences, arbitrary sequences of patterns, repeating patterns. Hex editors go for the byte level. Structure editors let you treat it as INI blocks, key=value pairs, XML trees. IDEs let you treat it as functions, methods, classes, headers.
And the more of them you can see, the more tools you can use - e.g. treating CSVs as lines of text in one context, then comma separated text, then comma separated dates and numbers and text, then entries in a user database, that lets you do different kind of processing on the same data where someone who sees it only as "a CSV" is more restricted.
(I suspect that's a part of general thinking; being able to see the same thing in different overlapping contexts which let you take it apart at different size boundaries; e.g. a dessert on a table, is also a trifle, which is part sponge cake, which is a flour/butter/egg/sugar mix which is a starch/fat/binding/sweetner and that lets you rebuild it either as swapping the trifle out at your dinner party, or swapping the sponge out for biscuits in the trifle, or swapping the butter for margarine in the sponge recipe. Someone stuck in the pattern "children's parties always have trifle" or "this is an Italian theme dinner party so it has to have an Italian dessert" is limited, someone who sees a trifle as something you buy from a shop and can't make one, is limited, someone who sees trifle as "made with sponge" is limited, someone who sees sponge as a single recipe is limited, someone who can swap any part at any level at their convenience is more flexible, less limited; someone who can do that on the fly for any of the foods on the table, would make a really good cook/host/organizer).
See also: inside computers, it's all bytes, that's all there is.
See also: Steve Yegge classic essay "The Emacs Problem" https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/the-emacs-problem "How did I get so far off the original track of text processing? Well, that's the punch line of this shaggy-dog story: it's all text processing! Log files, configuration files, XML data, query strings, mini-languages, programming languages, transformers, web pages, word documents, everything... the vast majority of your programming work involves text processing somehow. What would you rather do? Learn 16 different languages and frameworks in order to do "simple" log-file and configuration-file processing? Or just buckle down, learn Lisp, and have all of these problems go away forever?"
Sam certainly rendered text as lines, like you'd expect, respecting newlines as line breaks.
But it had a different idea about lines of text when it came to regular expressions. There was a metacharacter that matched newlines as if they were just another character, so that regular expressions could match blocks of text spanning multiple lines. A separate metacharacter matched newlines the way vim does.
This and other consequences of treating newline characters as just another character gave Sam a different feel, where lines weren't as important.
In windowed sam dot is the currently highlighted text and you have a snarf, cut and paste editor along with a separate window for commands.