Sam (program)

Sam is a text editor originally designed at Bell Labs by Rob Pike (with the help of Ken Thompson and other Unix developers) in the early 1980s for the DMD 5620 windowing terminal running Unix.

Related Topics:
Text editor - Bell Labs - Rob Pike - Ken Thompson - DMD 5620 - Unix

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It's inspired by the ed editor, but has a more powerful language and takes advantage of a bitmapped display and mouse chording. Windows are opened displaying various files (or parts of a file) concurrently and a special command window is used to enter commands in the sam language which can manipulate any of the open files.

Related Topics:
Ed - Mouse chording

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Sam can also run detached from a bitmapped terminal offering a similar interface to ed but with the more advanced sam language.

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Sam is the preferred text editor of many eminent computer scientists; it replaced ed as Ken Thompson's favorite text editor, and he still uses it to this day. Others, like Dennis Ritchie have moved on to use acme instead.

Related Topics:
Ed - Ken Thompson - Dennis Ritchie - Acme

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The debate of sam vs. acme runs deep in the Plan 9 community.

Related Topics:
Acme - Plan 9

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The latest incarnation of sam was written as part of the Plan 9 operating system but there are Microsoft Windows and X Window System ports available.

Related Topics:
Plan 9 - Microsoft Windows - X Window System

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