Re: [9fans] Musings on Interfaces

[Winston Kodogo <kodogo@gmail.com>]

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What I mean is, all I want to do (tm pjp) is to open a new file by
selecting File/Open, as in every other application I use, not type a series
of arcane commands into the small window at the top.And then use the Sam
command language in the open file. And yes, I'm whining, and yes I have the
source. Where is Boyd to threaten you with assault weapons when you need
him?

On 2 September 2016 at 10:56, Winston Kodogo <kodogo@gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks to Brantley for his thoughtful musings. Me, I love many things
> about Sam, but I just can't use it as my everyday editor. The structural
> regular expression stuff is a work of genius, but I still find, such are my
> limitations, that the user interface is just too clunky and retro.
>
> On 2 September 2016 at 02:42, Brantley Coile <brantleycoile@me.com> wrote:
>
>> I think I’ve been a member of 9fans for its entire history. The earliest
>> saved 9fans email in my /mail/box/bwc is dated 2001. But most of the time I
>> have not said much. Given that the list isn’t very busy these days, and
>> that I’m doing a lot of thinking about Plan 9, I thought I would post some
>> of my seemingly random musings.
>>
>> Today I’m thinking about Plan 9’s interfaces.
>>
>> The reason for thinking about those is that I’ve just switch back to
>> sam(1) from acme(1). No real reason, except for the old adage, a change is
>> as good as a rest. I’ve been working 10 to 12 hour days, six days a week
>> lately. I just wanted to change things a bit. Nothing against acme. I’ve
>> been using it for many years and it is a great tool.
>>
>> The one time that Ken Thompson visited my office, when I had an office in
>> Redwood City, he noticed that I was using acme and made a comment to the
>> effect that “you are one of those.” He uses sam as do many of the folks who
>> created Plan 9. Many of the original folks also use acme. I had did a poll
>> years ago but can’t seem to find the results. As did I for many years, even
>> after acme make its appearance. I had gotten a version of it working on my
>> Unix using an Teletype 630 terminal, downloading the samterm and all. It
>> was the main Plan 9 editor during my very brief tenure at Bell Labs in
>> 1990. Acme came after I left with the arrival of Phil Winterbottom and his
>> Alef language. The window manager was 8 1/2, which is like rio(1) without
>> the bumpers one can use to move and resize the window.
>>
>> I must say that it is refreshing to be back with the older editor. I did
>> have modify rio to look for an environmental variable that tells it not to
>> do acme chording. I kept trying to use chording in sam and realized that
>> part of the problem was that I could still use it in rio. So, I added a
>> shell variable that turned that feature of rio off. After that subconscious
>> chording stopped.
>>
>> I don’t think that sam is better than acme, or even the other way around.
>> Both do a good job of getting the job done. They are different. And that
>> difference has an affect on the way one used the system. When I use acme, I
>> mostly stay in acme, using the win program for my shell access. It becomes
>> a kind of integrated environment. With sam, I seem to use tools like sed
>> and awk in the rio windows, like sed and awk more than when I was using
>> acme. I had a similar thing happen when in the 1980’s I dropped vi for ed.
>> I used ed until the 1990’s when I was able to switch to sam full time.
>>
>> But my use of edit commands in sam is the biggest difference between it
>> and acme.
>>
>> In sam, I think more about how to modify things using the command window
>> rather than moving the mouse around and clicking on things. The command
>> language in acme using the Edit command is the same, but somehow it feels
>> different. There is something to be said for the convenience of the command
>> windows in sam.
>>
>> If I thought of the change as an experiment, one result would be the time
>> it took me to not have to think about which editor I was using while
>> working. Our tools should be, for the most part, transparent. It took about
>> a week to switch back to sam from acme. That time is certainly a function
>> of how much I used sam in the past.
>>
>> I’m very grateful to still be using these tools. It’s a very personal
>> thing but for someone who first used 6th Edition Unix, ed and the old
>> shell, and used all the versions of Unix that followed, these tools, both
>> acme and sam, rio and 8 1/2, are an improvement to all that proceeded them
>> and followed them.
>>
>>   Brantley Coile
>>
>>
>>
>

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