🚀 go-pugleaf

Sam, the editor for Unix/X11 by Rob Pike & Howard Trickey, provides a
mouse-driven point-and-type|cut|paste interface and a simple powerful
command language. Sam has multi-file editing, unlimited undo, multi-line
regular expressions, and sophisticated editing by chaining simple commands
together -- sort of like unix pipelines.

But despite Sam's attractive features, many people give up after trying it
for a while, finding the interface too mouse-intensive. It's great to point
with a mouse at where or what you want to edit. But almost everything in
sam requires the mouse, even things arguably easier with keystrokes like
scrolling or switching between file and command windows.

I have developed extensions to sam that keep all the features of sam's
mouse interface and command language, but allow for less mouse activity by
mapping much of the sam "mouse language" to user-tailorable keyboard keys.
The extensions also provide a basic autoindent and user-tailorable default
window locations.

The materials for the extensions are available from uxc.cso.uiuc.edu
in pub/sam/samx1.0.shar.

The tailorable key portion of the extensions requires perl. Sites with a
perl earlier than 4.035 will also want the patch in pub/sam/samx1.0.ME-TOO.

Sam itself is available from research.att.com in dist/sam/bundle.Z. It's a
fairly large package (about 14,000 lines), but an easy build on many
Unix/X11 platforms. It shouldn't need more than minor fiddling on most unix
systems with an ANSI/POSIX C compiler and Xlib/Xt. (It might have problems
on SVR3 platforms whose Xt uses a broken or incomplete implementation of
BSD select.)

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Ed Kubaitis (ejk@ux2.cso.uiuc.edu)
Computing & Communications Services Office - University of Illinois, Urbana