In 9front's version of sam there are two additional commands that could help you with "complex" commands, perhaps. ^ Plan 9-command Send the standard output of the Plan 9 command to the command window. _ Plan 9-command Send the range to the standard input, and send the standard output of the Plan 9 command to the command window. On Sat, May 21, 2016 at 11:52 PM, Mark Lee Smith wrote: > Thanks for the interesting comments. > > I've been making an effort to use Sam, in the interest of my own > understanding. One of the biggest barriers I've hit is that there doesn't > appear to be a good way to save complex edit commands for later. The man > page suggests that it's possible to send commands to Sam from shell scripts. > > External communication > Sam listens to the edit plumb port. If plumbing is not > active, on invocation sam creates a named pipe /srv/sam.user > which acts as an additional source of commands. Characters > written to the named pipe are treated as if they had been > typed in the command window. > > B is a shell-level command that causes an instance of sam > running on the same terminal to load the named files. B uses > either plumbing or the named pipe, whichever service is > available. If plumbing is not enabled, the option allows a > line number to be specified for the initial position to dis- > play in the last named file (plumbing provides a more gen- > eral mechanism for this ability). > > E is a shell-level command that can be used as $EDITOR in a > Unix environment. It runs B on file and then does not exit > until file is changed, which is taken as a signal that file > is done being edited. > > I use Plan9Port on OpenBSD and typically use the plumber with Acme. I've > changed "editor" to sam, and read the B and E scripts. As I understand it > the plumbing approach doesn't allows sending arbitrary commands, so I've > stopped the plumber. I'm unable to find the named pipe and looking at the > sam source code it's not obvious to me how or whether such a pipe is > created. Is this capability still present in Sam? Perhaps the plumber has > completely subsumed this by now? Ultimately what I'd like to know is how > you go about reusing common commands? Do you snarf and paste them? I was > thinking that it would be useful to create scripts like "ap" which select > the current paragraph (name inspired by Vim.) What's the typical workflow > when using Sam? I don't deny that it's a great editor. Writing several > thousand words in Sam yesterday was a pleasure. > > Maybe I'm completely off base here? > > All the best, > > Mark > > > > > > On Fri, 20 May 2016 at 22:05 Steve Simon wrote: > >> >> I started with Sam a sit ran on all the different unixes I used an vi an >> emacs just felt clunky. >> >> I never got into help and when acme replaced that I just never made the >> transition. >> >> I love Sam, though it is because I know it so well. >> >> btw, anyone written scripts to allow the plan9 wiki to be edited from >> Sam? maybe the wiki is outmoded these days? >> >> -Steve >> >> >> >>