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* [9fans] Musings on Interfaces
@ 2016-09-01 14:42 Brantley Coile
  2016-09-01 15:40 ` Bakul Shah
                   ` (3 more replies)
  0 siblings, 4 replies; 18+ messages in thread
From: Brantley Coile @ 2016-09-01 14:42 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

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




^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 18+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] Musings on Interfaces
  2016-09-01 14:42 [9fans] Musings on Interfaces Brantley Coile
@ 2016-09-01 15:40 ` Bakul Shah
  2016-09-01 16:05   ` Mark van Atten
  2016-09-01 15:59 ` James A. Robinson
                   ` (2 subsequent siblings)
  3 siblings, 1 reply; 18+ messages in thread
From: Bakul Shah @ 2016-09-01 15:40 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

Yesterday someone asked me how come the two 24" monitors on my desk @ work were turned off and I was using the laptop exclusively. Apart from having to be in meetings, the main reason is that acme on a hires "retina" display is more than good enough for programming. I still switch to vi for certain things (mainly because vi has become "transparent"  through decades of use). And occasionally notepad for Unicode requiring complex text layout. 3-4 column layout in acme works about right for me.

> On Sep 1, 2016, at 7:42 AM, 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
> 
> 




^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 18+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] Musings on Interfaces
  2016-09-01 14:42 [9fans] Musings on Interfaces Brantley Coile
  2016-09-01 15:40 ` Bakul Shah
@ 2016-09-01 15:59 ` James A. Robinson
  2016-09-01 16:36 ` Adriano Verardo
  2016-09-01 22:56 ` Winston Kodogo
  3 siblings, 0 replies; 18+ messages in thread
From: James A. Robinson @ 2016-09-01 15:59 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

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I used to use sam exclusively on my Linux machine.  I had to stop after I
switched to Mac OS X many years ago.

A few years later I picked up acme, and have been using it since.  I also
find that, for some reason I can't explain, I have rarely reached for the
Edit X// command in a scratch window.   I really ought to use it more
often, it's not *that* much different than the sam command window, and I
naturally made very heavy use of the sam command language when I was using
sam(1) all the time.  For some reason in my head there is a tiny barrier
between using Edit X// vs. selecting a window in sam and then using the
command window.

The one thing I  always miss from sam is the remote editor ability.  Given
sam + ssh it was really a joy to be able to remote edit files, much nicer
than using the remote editing capability of emacs.  I had plumber rules set
up so that I could use a remote 'B' command to trigger opening the files
from the remote machine, and it was very nice to seamlessly navigate and
edit w/o really thinking about where the file was.

Jim

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 18+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] Musings on Interfaces
  2016-09-01 15:40 ` Bakul Shah
@ 2016-09-01 16:05   ` Mark van Atten
  2016-09-01 17:20     ` James A. Robinson
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 18+ messages in thread
From: Mark van Atten @ 2016-09-01 16:05 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

The one regret I have about sam is that it doesn't do scroll-select. I
write papers rather than programs, and often want to select and
quickly move around large chunks of text whose boundaries are usually
not marked syntactically, even though I use LaTeX.

On the other hand, I find sam a more quiet experience than acme. In
acme it helps to let windows take over the whole column (B3) often.

Mark.



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 18+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] Musings on Interfaces
  2016-09-01 14:42 [9fans] Musings on Interfaces Brantley Coile
  2016-09-01 15:40 ` Bakul Shah
  2016-09-01 15:59 ` James A. Robinson
@ 2016-09-01 16:36 ` Adriano Verardo
  2016-09-01 17:54   ` Brantley Coile
  2016-09-01 22:56 ` Winston Kodogo
  3 siblings, 1 reply; 18+ messages in thread
From: Adriano Verardo @ 2016-09-01 16:36 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

Brantley Coile wrote:
>
> 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.
Cool.
Who said "Unix v7 (or 6 ?) is the major improvement of all subsequent 
releases" ?
(or something similar, sorry for my poor spoken english)
>    Brantley Coile
>
>
>




^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 18+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] Musings on Interfaces
  2016-09-01 16:05   ` Mark van Atten
@ 2016-09-01 17:20     ` James A. Robinson
  2016-09-01 19:10       ` Mark van Atten
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 18+ messages in thread
From: James A. Robinson @ 2016-09-01 17:20 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 693 bytes --]

On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 9:05 AM, Mark van Atten <vanattenmark@gmail.com>
wrote:

> The one regret I have about sam is that it doesn't do scroll-select. I
> write papers rather than programs, and often want to select and
> quickly move around large chunks of text whose boundaries are usually
> not marked syntactically, even though I use LaTeX.


​So you couldn't do something like clicking on the start and typing in a
.,/<pattern>/ where <pattern> holds the last few words of the text range
you wanted to select?  I understand not having regular markup like a
program, but if a few words could be used to identify the end point I would
have assumed you could use that?

Jim

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 18+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] Musings on Interfaces
  2016-09-01 16:36 ` Adriano Verardo
@ 2016-09-01 17:54   ` Brantley Coile
  2016-09-01 18:05     ` arnold
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 18+ messages in thread
From: Brantley Coile @ 2016-09-01 17:54 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

Steve Bourne said it about 7th Edition.  I just asked him. He also said it turned out to be mostly true.
 
> On Sep 1, 2016, at 12:36 PM, Adriano Verardo <adr.verardo@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Brantley Coile wrote:
>> 
>> 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.
> Cool.
> Who said "Unix v7 (or 6 ?) is the major improvement of all subsequent releases" ?
> (or something similar, sorry for my poor spoken english)
>>   Brantley Coile
>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
> 




^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 18+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] Musings on Interfaces
  2016-09-01 17:54   ` Brantley Coile
@ 2016-09-01 18:05     ` arnold
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 18+ messages in thread
From: arnold @ 2016-09-01 18:05 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 9fans

Steve was borrowing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL :

	C. A. R. Hoare remarked: "Here is a language so far ahead of its
	time that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors but
	also on nearly all its successors."

(This one is also mostly true. :-)

Arnold

Brantley Coile <brantleycoile@me.com> wrote:

> Steve Bourne said it about 7th Edition.  I just asked him. He also said it turned out to be mostly true.
>  
> > On Sep 1, 2016, at 12:36 PM, Adriano Verardo <adr.verardo@gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > Brantley Coile wrote:
> >> 
> >> 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.
> > Cool.
> > Who said "Unix v7 (or 6 ?) is the major improvement of all subsequent releases" ?
> > (or something similar, sorry for my poor spoken english)
> >>   Brantley Coile
> >> 
> >> 
> >> 
> > 
> > 
>
>



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 18+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] Musings on Interfaces
  2016-09-01 17:20     ` James A. Robinson
@ 2016-09-01 19:10       ` Mark van Atten
  2016-09-01 22:15         ` Travis Moore
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 18+ messages in thread
From: Mark van Atten @ 2016-09-01 19:10 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 7:20 PM, James A. Robinson <jimr@highwire.org> wrote:

> So you couldn't do something like clicking on the start and typing in a
> .,/<pattern>/ where <pattern> holds the last few words of the text range you
> wanted to select?  I understand not having regular markup like a program,
> but if a few words could be used to identify the end point I would have
> assumed you could use that?

That is convenient in cases where I recall a pattern that otherwise
would require
scrolling to see. Or where I have zeroxed the window and the other one
shows the end of the passage in question.

But otherwise I may as well use k and '.

And of course k and ' (and snarf and paste) work well enough. It is
just that acme's scroll-select
(and chording) is so much more convenient! Chording as such is
possible in p9p sam with one
simple modification in the source, but it is the combination with
scroll-select that counts here.

Mark.



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 18+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] Musings on Interfaces
  2016-09-01 19:10       ` Mark van Atten
@ 2016-09-01 22:15         ` Travis Moore
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 18+ messages in thread
From: Travis Moore @ 2016-09-01 22:15 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 9fans

9front's sam also has chording, as well as ^B to switch to the command
window without reaching for the mouse, which I find very useful.
Occasionally I wish for scroll-select but ' and k do the trick, and
keep my head in the structure of the document.

Travis



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 18+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] Musings on Interfaces
  2016-09-01 14:42 [9fans] Musings on Interfaces Brantley Coile
                   ` (2 preceding siblings ...)
  2016-09-01 16:36 ` Adriano Verardo
@ 2016-09-01 22:56 ` Winston Kodogo
  2016-09-02  1:52   ` Winston Kodogo
                     ` (2 more replies)
  3 siblings, 3 replies; 18+ messages in thread
From: Winston Kodogo @ 2016-09-01 22:56 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 4140 bytes --]

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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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 18+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] Musings on Interfaces
  2016-09-01 22:56 ` Winston Kodogo
@ 2016-09-02  1:52   ` Winston Kodogo
  2016-09-02  9:06     ` cinap_lenrek
  2016-09-02  6:10   ` Mart Zirnask
  2016-09-02  7:34   ` Steve Simon
  2 siblings, 1 reply; 18+ messages in thread
From: Winston Kodogo @ 2016-09-02  1:52 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 4674 bytes --]

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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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 18+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] Musings on Interfaces
  2016-09-01 22:56 ` Winston Kodogo
  2016-09-02  1:52   ` Winston Kodogo
@ 2016-09-02  6:10   ` Mart Zirnask
  2016-09-02  7:34   ` Steve Simon
  2 siblings, 0 replies; 18+ messages in thread
From: Mart Zirnask @ 2016-09-02  6:10 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

There is also a very actively maintained stand-alone Unix fork for sam:
https://github.com/deadpixi/sam

It has several additional keybindings, a command ("b") to perform a
fuzzy match on file names and, most recently -- colors!
(Be sure to look at the screenshot.)

Sam is really interesting. Cheers,
mart,
non-techie and newb

On 2 September 2016 at 01:56, 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
>>
>>
>



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 18+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] Musings on Interfaces
  2016-09-01 22:56 ` Winston Kodogo
  2016-09-02  1:52   ` Winston Kodogo
  2016-09-02  6:10   ` Mart Zirnask
@ 2016-09-02  7:34   ` Steve Simon
  2016-09-02  7:59     ` Ole-Hjalmar Kristensen
  2 siblings, 1 reply; 18+ messages in thread
From: Steve Simon @ 2016-09-02  7:34 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 4543 bytes --]

hi,

Sam has been my only editor since the X11 port was released in about 1992.
I have not really tried acme, I never gave it a real chance but I used to use it
to edit the plan 9 wiki so I have a little skill.

I agree scroll select is the one feature I would add - I have a feeling the 9front guys may have already done this...

I think it is just habit but I find Sam so comfortable I just resist change.

-Steve


> On 1 Sep 2016, at 23:56, 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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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 18+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] Musings on Interfaces
  2016-09-02  7:34   ` Steve Simon
@ 2016-09-02  7:59     ` Ole-Hjalmar Kristensen
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 18+ messages in thread
From: Ole-Hjalmar Kristensen @ 2016-09-02  7:59 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 5503 bytes --]

I use Sam mostly for the remote editing facility, but I should perhaps try
to add plumber rules to  use a remote 'B' command to trigger opening the
files from the remote machine like James A. Robinson mentioned. Apart from
that, acme is my main command center. I usually have acme straddling two
monitors, with command windows running ssh to Solaris, Linux, and Windows
boxes. The file system is shared, so this lets me have essentially the same
environment on multiple platforms. Also, I find the acme button 3
invaluable when reading debug logs, since clicking on a file:line output in
the log immediately lets me see in which context the output was generated.

On Fri, Sep 2, 2016 at 9:34 AM, Steve Simon <steve@quintile.net> wrote:

> hi,
>
> Sam has been my only editor since the X11 port was released in about 1992.
> I have not really tried acme, I never gave it a real chance but I used to
> use it
> to edit the plan 9 wiki so I have a little skill.
>
> I agree scroll select is the one feature I would add - I have a feeling
> the 9front guys may have already done this...
>
> I think it is just habit but I find Sam so comfortable I just resist
> change.
>
> -Steve
>
>
> On 1 Sep 2016, at 23:56, 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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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 18+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] Musings on Interfaces
  2016-09-02  1:52   ` Winston Kodogo
@ 2016-09-02  9:06     ` cinap_lenrek
  2016-09-02 14:19       ` Steven Stallion
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 18+ messages in thread
From: cinap_lenrek @ 2016-09-02  9:06 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 9fans

> 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?

we call it the plumber. any text window can serve as a file/open in plan9,
you just plumb the file name by pressing the middle mouse... OH! wait!
you have no middle button on your apple-pc. too bad...

--
cinap



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 18+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] Musings on Interfaces
  2016-09-02  9:06     ` cinap_lenrek
@ 2016-09-02 14:19       ` Steven Stallion
  2016-09-02 15:37         ` Kurt H Maier
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 18+ messages in thread
From: Steven Stallion @ 2016-09-02 14:19 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

On Fri, Sep 2, 2016 at 4:06 AM,  <cinap_lenrek@felloff.net> wrote:
> OH! wait!
> you have no middle button on your apple-pc. too bad...

Strange... Option+click works great for me when I don't have a
3-button USB mouse plugged in (they make these too you know). Chording
using the keyboard is quite pleasant as well.

Steve



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 18+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] Musings on Interfaces
  2016-09-02 14:19       ` Steven Stallion
@ 2016-09-02 15:37         ` Kurt H Maier
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 18+ messages in thread
From: Kurt H Maier @ 2016-09-02 15:37 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

On Fri, Sep 02, 2016 at 09:19:48AM -0500, Steven Stallion wrote:
>
> Strange... Option+click works great for me when I don't have a
> 3-button USB mouse plugged in (they make these too you know). Chording
> using the keyboard is quite pleasant as well.
>

We call this 'typing'



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 18+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2016-09-02 15:37 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 18+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2016-09-01 14:42 [9fans] Musings on Interfaces Brantley Coile
2016-09-01 15:40 ` Bakul Shah
2016-09-01 16:05   ` Mark van Atten
2016-09-01 17:20     ` James A. Robinson
2016-09-01 19:10       ` Mark van Atten
2016-09-01 22:15         ` Travis Moore
2016-09-01 15:59 ` James A. Robinson
2016-09-01 16:36 ` Adriano Verardo
2016-09-01 17:54   ` Brantley Coile
2016-09-01 18:05     ` arnold
2016-09-01 22:56 ` Winston Kodogo
2016-09-02  1:52   ` Winston Kodogo
2016-09-02  9:06     ` cinap_lenrek
2016-09-02 14:19       ` Steven Stallion
2016-09-02 15:37         ` Kurt H Maier
2016-09-02  6:10   ` Mart Zirnask
2016-09-02  7:34   ` Steve Simon
2016-09-02  7:59     ` Ole-Hjalmar Kristensen

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