The Text Editor Sam by Rob Pike
A minimalist text editor with a graphical user interface, a very powerful command language and remote editing capabilities. Written by Rob Pike.
Also could be considered a graphical version of the venerable ed on steroids, lots of steroids.
Ports
The source for Sam is extremely portable, and ports exist for many platforms, here are some:
- The latest and ‘official’ sam version is included as part of Plan 9 from Bell Labs and Plan 9 from User Space for Unix-like operating systems (including Linux and *BSD).
- A standalone port of p9p’s sam to Windows, includes some command line utilities (grep, awk, 9p, etc.) by Michael Teichgräber. (Download mirror.) bitbucket* Updated build of pf9, reported to work on 64-bit Windows.
- deadpixi/sam - An extended version of sam based on the 1980s netlib port that includes many new features.
Documentation and Manuals
- The Text Editor
sam- The original paper by Rob Pike. - sam(1) - The sam man page in Plan 9.
- A tutorial for the sam command language - Documents the editing language.
- A Sam commands cheat sheet by Steve Simon.
Contact and Support
- 9fans
- join #plan9 on irc.oftc.net
Notable Sam Users
- Ken Thompson, inventor of UNIX and many other things.
- Brian Kernighan, of K&R and K&P fame, the ‘K’ in awk, and much more.
- Doug McIlroy, inventor of UNIX pipes.
- Tom Duff (of Duff’s Device and Star Wars' Death Star fame).
- Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of C++.
About the Name
Sam is short for Samantha.
Related Projects and Programs
- Acme: Rob’s next, more ambitious (some might say over-ambitious) text editor and user interface for programmers.
- ssam - An rc script that is part of Plan 9 from User Space and allows using the sam language on streams.