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.)

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
• #plan9@irc.freenode.org

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.
• 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

• Acme: Rob's next, more ambitious (some might say over-ambitious) text editor and user interface for programmers.
• Plan 9 from User Space contains an rc script to use the sam language on streams (ala sed) called ssam.

See also

• emacs(1)
• vi(1)
• jim - Another, ancient, graphical text editor by Rob Pike for the Blit Unix terminal.