Byron's comments

[John (For the colours are many, but the light is one.) Mackin <john@ civil.su.oz.au>]

    1) I make command window appear on the left by default. i.e.,
    the window is tall&thin, not short&fat.

Use the Scrollbar, Luke!! :)

    2) I hacked the selection-positioning code so that that
    when the current selection is skipped to, that selection
    is in the middle of the screen rather than right at the top.

This is a damn fine plan.  I don't know why I didn't ever do this.
Does this have a good side-effect on what happens when you type at
the bottom of the window?  That is, does it make it scroll only half
instead of the whole window, leaving you with only a line or so of context?
I find that annoying, and so over the years have developed the habit of
never typing across the bottom, but just scrolling with the scrollbar when
that time gets near.  ... hmm.  I have just realised a possible reason
for not doing this.  If you are doing repeated searches for something
that's reasonably frequent (and that's a common idiom of mine: "look"
"look" "look" clicking on Button Two) this could cause twice as many
scrolls.  Hmm.

    In general, I have found that sam likes to dump core all too
    frequently under SunOS.

Yes.  That's the other reason I haven't changed to that version of sam
from the one I am using: it doesn't seem to be solid at all yet.  I have
had a couple of "panic: Bflush"es out of it just in testing.  This is
not a UNIX-version problem; people I know who use Plan 9 say that the
sam on there does this too.  It's not repeatable (read: we don't know
how to repeat it).  The sam I use _never_ panics.

Another reason I haven't switched (as mentioned in mail to Chris earlier)
is that the interface has moved a bit far for my taste from the precisely
Blit-like interface I am now using.  By far the worst aspect is the fact that
the Button Three menu doesn't scroll, but just grows taller without bound
as you add files.

Another reason I haven't switched is because my window manager (gwm 1.7i)
has a bug that prevents clients that use the WM_TAKE_FOCUS protocol, which
the new sam does, from ever getting the focus.  I think David Hogan has a
fix for this -- I haven't gotten it from him yet.  Note that the current
version of gwm (1.7n, I think) exhibits the same symptom for what seems to be
a different reason, and we don't have a fix for that version.

To contrast with the bashing, I was pleased by the performance of the
new sam under test (speed-wise, I mean).  I was concerned since the
libXg they distribute is built on Xt.  The jerq-tools emulation in the
sam I use is built on raw Xlib and is a speed demon.  I was very happy
to see that the new version didn't seem to be noticeably slower.

    Modifying sam to use, for example, ctags, might be more of a
    challenge.

Before anyone tries this, let me say that it would be far, far better
to see if we can get the Labs to give us "samuel" instead.  samuel is sam
with built-in C browser knowledge; much more powerful than ctags.
Caveat: I've never used samuel.  I have, however, spent a bit of time
watching someone who was skilled with it and used to it use it, and it
looked very smooth indeed.  Unfortunately the manual entry isn't in
the printed V10 manual -- they relegated it to section A, the `unprinted
appendix' -- but you get the idea.  Just like sam -- if you don't use the
browser features, you don't notice them -- and the menus remain uncluttered.
But if you want to, you can do all the good things: show me the declaration
of the selected identifier, or all uses of it, etc. etc.

The database handling is particularly nice since it is updated lazily --
and you can go on editing while that's happening.

OK,
John.