NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/comp/editors/2849

Text File | 1992-11-23 | 3.4 KB | 74 lines

Newsgroups: comp.editors
Path: sparky!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sdd.hp.com!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!news.cso.uiuc.edu!ux2.cso.uiuc.edu!ejk
From: [e-mail] (Ed Kubaitis - CCSO)
Subject: Re: Anyone use SAM?
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail] (Net Noise owner)
Organization: University of Illinois - Urbana
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1992 17:42:33 GMT
Keywords: sam, ai
Lines: 61

[e-mail] (Boyd Roberts) writes:
  |[e-mail] (Robert Starr) writes:
  |> But settable tabs, auto-indent, and brace matching are not
  |> a lot to ask from a programmers editor.  Sam looks good, but I cannot
  |> understand why these 3 simple features were left out (unless I missed
  |> something in the supplied documentation).
  |
  |Sam does brace matching with a double click on button 1:
  |
  |     Button 1 changes selection.  Pointing to a non-current window with but-
  |     ton 1 makes it current; within the current window, button 1 selects
  |     text, thus setting dot.  Double-clicking selects text to the boundaries
  |     of words, lines, quoted strings or bracketed strings, depending on the
  |     text at the click.
  |
  |It lets your left hand do auto indent.  Just how hard is it to type tab?

Well, I suppose tab's not so bad if you mostly write/modify K&R style
full-tab indent C. One hit for each line for level 1, two hits/line for
level 2, ...  By the time you get to 5 or so, your text is going to wrap
around so it's hard to read anyway, so you don't care about speed;-)

Seriously, part of the answer probably *is* that full tab indentation is
all Murray Hill (and lots of other people) want. But having worked on adding
a vi-like ai/sw to samterm, I suspect another part of the answer is that
adding features to samterm is not all that easy/clean to do. The relevant
piece of code for ai/sw is samterm/main.c:type(), an event-driven pinball
machine whose only only two comments are:

    /* what a bloody mess this is */

and a bit later

    /* ICK */

Encouraged by those comments to commit further atrocities, I persevered
and got an ai/sw option working (to a first order) over the weekend.

What made it hard is one of the things that makes Sam interesting. Sam
(like 8 1/2) was designed to make a bitmap graphic interface responsive
not only at LAN speeds, but over low speed (as low as 9600) lines to your
bitmap display at *home*. The (largely undocumented) caches/Rasps/protocols
between sam and samterm to make remote mouse driven editing work over
9600 BPS lines do not yield source code that invites adding "features".

Other things (besides remote editing) that make Sam interesting (to me):

   o structural expression pipelines
   o undo to help you interactively develop them
   o multi-file editing
   o the clean, small command set and simple graphical interface might
     make sam a good editor for new-to-unix people.

You don't bother with Sam if all you want is small-muscle ergonomics.
With only Sam's spartan and hard-to-modify (IMO) graphical interface
to commend it, I would have abandoned it rather than pursue a few comforts
for my vi-wired lower brain.

----------------------------------
Ed Kubaitis ([e-mail])
Computing & Communications Services Office - University of Illinois, Urbana