Sam and emacs

[Scott Deerwester scott@cs.ust.hk]

Vijay writes:

>> However, I think Rob Pike has said that they are trying
>> to get Plan 9 publicly released.  I assume he means as
>> free software along the lines of awk or sam.  I believe
>> this is the only way Plan 9 will ever have a chance to see
>> the widespread use it deserves, and so I hope very much
>> that this happens.
> 

> Oh god, I think the earth moved for me.
> I am drumming up support for plan 9 here, but when I say it
> doesn't run emacs, people lose all interest and the weird thing
> is that after about 2 weeks of running sam, I would hate to go
> back to emacs, and I am a die hard emacs/vi fan.  But most people
> don't seem to be willing to take the time to learn sam properly.
> People I showed sam to... oh whats the point.

I'm really hesitant to bring this up...  but the main barrier to me to
making Plan 9 my major environment is the disdain for emacs.  I
*really* appreciate having an editor that is programmable down to its
bones, in something like a real programming language.  It's not that
I'm addicted to left-meta-shift-coke bottle style interfaces, but...
I really don't understand the "this page intentionally left blank"
attitude.  I mean, the fact that you can build things like ange-ftp
and WWW mode is *really* nice!  How do accomodate the same sort of
thing in sam?  And I don't know how to function without emacs' gdb
mode!  The fact that the editor itself can put me at the line where
the music stopped, and I've got a full honest-to-God editor under me
without having to go, "Uh.. lessee.. that was line 136 in file
blurfle.c..".  And when I recompile, I have all of the error messages
in a buffer, and need two keystrokes per syntax error (which adds up
if you've got enough syntax errors ;-) to page through them and fix
them -- again, with a real editor.

And then there's guess-indent mode that does about as good a job as I
can at figuring out where I probably wanted the cursor after the line
wraps, and abbrev mode, which now auto-corrects all of my most common
typos -- watching somebody's face when I type "taht " and they see the
"a" and the "h" switch places as soon as I hit the space is kind of
fun.

There's lots that I don't like about emacs, but the fact that it's
*programmable* means that my productivity as a programmer and generic
computer professional is about an order of magnitude higher than it
would have been if I didn't have it.

The most common complaint that I hear about emacs is that there are
too many blasted things to learn -- and the learning curve *is* really
steep.  But that doesn't seem to be the reason for the intentional
blank page in the Plan 9 manual.  Would somebody please enlighten me?