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If anyone uses sam (or another editor that would be considered more “primitive” than something like vim or Emacs), I’d love to hear what you have to say about it. Why use that particular tool, what does it give you that other editors don’t or what does it enable that is important to your workflow? Thanks!
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I’m a long-time sam user. So far sam is the best graphical editor I’ve used, and one of the very few that actively invites me to use the mouse when editing text; it’s just so natural. I should note that I’m a long time user of the chording patch (now in the deadpixi version), which make moving text much faster and easier than it would otherwise be. sam doesn’t have very much special power for editing text, but it works smoothly. Also, like vi (and unlike Emacs) it has the virtue that it plays well with other Unix tools in that you can do things like select areas (or the entire file) and pipe them through programs like fmt. As vi users know, this is a great way to leverage the power of everything on your system.
One subtle thing about sam is its command window and the command lines that you enter there. These give you extra visibility on what you’re doing and also let you successively refine large scale modifications, since you can see, reuse, and extend commands. It’s routine for me to start by doing just, say, the part that will select the text I intend to modify; when that’s selecting the right thing, I’ll redo it with the change command. Did something go wrong? Undo, modify the command, re-send it to try again.
I personally quite like how sam deals with editing multiple files. I find that it makes it very easy to go back and forth between several files without pain, although having several on the screen at once is not as easy as it is in something like Emacs. Part of this may be that I have never really learned how vi does this and find what I do know somewhat awkward. sam has a clear conceptual model where it has all files loaded in at once, some or all files may be modified from their on-disk version, and so on. Emacs does this too, but sam has the nice popup menu of all the files that makes moving around among them easier for me.
I mostly don’t use sam for large scale programming in most languages, because Emacs has all sorts of very nice superintelligent autoindent and this and that. But for quick modifications, or for languages where Emacs doesn’t do what I like, or for text, sam works great for me.
(sam’s multi-file structured editing also makes it the best tool for certain sorts of mass modifications, because you can easily run a single modification over a whole bunch of files all at once. But at least for me this is a relatively uncommon thing that I might do only once or twice a year.)
I go back and forth between sam, vi(m), and Emacs depending on what I’m doing. Emacs is my big-programming editor; sam is my generally preferred editor if I’m in an X environment where I have it set up; vi(m) is my sysadmin editor because it’s always there and works in any environment and starts and runs fast.
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note: using vim as main editor.
Sam is nice in many ways. Using it for quite some time for editing small files and replying from mutt.
Also used Sam in a work project, using fzf to select files and open them using
B. Quite elegant and simple.What I like: - ability to organize your workspace. It’s like a floating wm. Like it way more than acme’s “tiling” structure - command window - ability to use proportional font for reading long chunks of text
The only thing I found cumbersome, was that there was no way to navigate using keyboard between open files.
Tried to build Sam fork from deadpixi on OpenBSD, but failed miserably. Seems very nice though. :)
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The latest version of the code lets you rebind keys at compile time. Check it out. :)
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Please check out the latest source on GitHub. It should compile correctly on OpenBSD now; look at the comments in config.mk for information on how to compile.
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I’m a huge fan of ed (and sam). I have tried numerous times over the last decade to use ed as my main editor but consistently find myself falling back to something more ‘modern’.
There are relatively few things I miss when using ed but there are a couple of pain points that prevent me from using it as my daily driver:
- I really want my line editor to have a line editor. rlwrap gets me 90% of the way there but having a built-in version would be nice. One that supports vi-like bindings would be doubly great.
- Better regex. Sam’s structural regex is very nice but even something as ‘simple’ as pcre would be very useful
- Have the change command populate the line. There are some occasions where I can’t accomplish what I need with the basic regex and have to change a line. Populating the line buffer with the contents of the line would be very helpful to avoid typing out a majority of the line again.
- Mini multi-line buffer: This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. When in insert mode, it would be nice to edit previously entered lines. Anything between an ‘i’ (or ‘a’ or ‘c’) and ‘.’ becomes a editable multiline buffer. Yes, this really goes against the idea of a line editor but it would be so useful I don’t think I’d care.
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Do you know vi’s “open mode”? E.g. ex-vi implements it.
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Firstly, I make heavy use of a terminal multiplexer. I use tmux splits to open multiple files side-by-side and copy mode to view previous output in the scrollback. Sometimes I keep two splits open with the same file, one for browsing and one for editing.
I use the
zcommand with reckless abandon. Without specifying a number of lines, most implementations will use the windows size as n and display n lines. You can also useznto print the lines numbers but three keystrokes to browse with line numbers is a little much.If I need to address a line and I’m unsure of the address, I’ll just use a simple search to find what I’m looking for. If there’s only a few lines using the var $foo, I can
/\$fooand keep hitting enter until I find the line I want. If I’m really lazy, sometimes I’ll just,nto print the whole file with line numbers and use tmux’s search.The real trouble I run into, which forces me back to something like vim (or vis, these days), is large refactors. I find it very difficult to effectively move around blocks of text and adjust their indentation without immediate feedback.
The
change command, as mentioned above, can also be a pain. There are times when you may need to change a small part of a line but you either can’t find a regex that works or you can’t get ed’s minimal regex implementation to play nice. I ultimately wind up using theccommand to change the line, requiring me to type out the whole line again.Indentation sometimes gets me in trouble with my colleagues. I use tabs exclusively when working in ed and have to remember to format prior to committing. This is easier in languages which provide official formatters (go and rust) but requires more diligence with other languages.
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[Comment removed by author]
While I actually agree that being a cop in the current social system is unethical (especially in USA) and should be shunned, deflating that just to two words on a technically-minded community seems pointless.
[Comment removed by author]
Historically, the institution of police exists to protect property. Whether it be from rioting, exploited workers in the UK, or slave patrols in the US, modern police forces around the world all share these roots. Institutionally, a police force is the brutalizing arm of property’s enforcement, and only act to resolve general social conflict as a secondary function, which is why police forces tend to be filled with politically right wing individuals, with an atrocious tendency towards domestic violence, and often exact violence on minorities and mentally ill individuals, while failing to fulfill community needs in terms of domestic violence, gun violence, drug abuse, and sexual assault.
There are alternatives, but they require radically different community structuring than exist in western society. Sure, to you a “world without cops is unimaginable” makes sense, because the world (/society) that you live in couldn’t possibly govern itself, not in the state it’s in, socially and materially. However, that doesn’t make police a fact of nature, and the exploration of evolving community for self governance a waste of time.
I disagree with your argument in several respects.
The police don’t put any particular emphasis on enforcing property rights. The vast majority of police activity is just revenue-seeking via traffic law enforcement. After that are simple crimes like public intoxication and fighting. Most arrests don’t even lead to charges. “Civil asset forfeiture”, as it is euphemistically called, is literally just theft.
This is wrong. The police force works for a government, not the abstract notion of property. The law usually requires the government to protect property rights to some degree, but this is orthogonal to the fundamental role of the police.
What, exactly, do you think police should do more of in these instances? Drug abuse we can help via e.g. clean needle programs, but that’s not up to the police.
To be clear, I think the police system in its current form is pretty shit and could be improved in a lot of ways, but your post just seems like directionless communist idealism rather than a coherent critique or idea for improvement.
For drug use, police can help by not arresting (or searching) anyone for any drug-related crime (possession, purchase, sale, manufacture, transport, use, regardless of the drug type or quantity in question), with narrow exceptions like crimes of “dosing someone with drugs without their informed consent” or “driving while being impaired by drugs”.
It’s prohibition that’s the root cause of drug use being harmful – to both the people involved and also to the communities and society in which those people live.
I do think considerable police resources are put into defending the property of the wealthier part of society from the poorer part, and that this explains a good portion of the reason police forces exist and are well-funded. But, yeah, police are also not especially ideologically committed to enforcement of a philosophically grounded libertarian ideal of private property rights or anything. The rampant asset-forfeiture abuse you bring up is a good illustration of that, among others.
I think you could come up with an explanation for this situation that is more rather than less Marxist, though, relating to society being divided into classes, and the police being the hired muscle of one of its classes… i.e. they work for that class specifically, not for the abstract, theoretically equal-handed idea of private property. Although I’m pretty lefty, it’s also worth noting that there are libertarians spending quite a bit of time critiquing the current situation, as well. Folks like Randy Balko have been good in recent years on digging into how the police and the criminal-justice system fail to uphold the stated rights that people in lower socio-economic and minority racial positions are supposed to have.
Better late than never: the more hard-core libertarians, especially of the agorist variety, actually describe the society in class-divide terms. However, they draw the divide in a way that puts agents and workers of the government in the oppressors category, and the rest of the society in the oppressed.
Dear downvoter, have you read SEK3 yet?
Gave you back the karma that anon took bc nothing you said is itself wrong, but while I’m aware of market anarchism and have my own opinions on it (eg, the market cannot undo the contradictions inherent to the market), what sets SEK3’s agorism apart from Rothbardian market anarchism (which he appears to relate agorism to)?
SEK3 has described a full-fledged class system, taken further than Rothbard’s rulers vs ruled dichotomy. Moreover, SEK3 says salary job and corporations would not exist in Agora, but this I disagree with.
Such as?
The accumulation of capital causes over-accumulation (resulting in economic crises) and naturally tends to centralize capital1
EDIT: More clear wording and also David Harvey explains the contradictions of the market really well here
This analysis I’ve conveyed (it’s not my own), doesn’t rely specifically on individual actions of the police; instead, it’s presupposed on the material obligations and systemic relationship of a police force to the state and its people. However, in this analysis it also relies on underlying analysis wrt the state under the capitalist mode of production. That underlying analysis proposes that this state exists to defend the material interests of the ruling class, not out of conspiracy or individual actions, but out of necessity, self preservation. Under this analysis, the police are the domestic force of that state protecting the material interests of that ruling class (primarily property, but also given that commodities and capital are predicated on the ownership of property… PS: my reading on this tidbit could be wrong! I leave those better read on political economy to correct me here). This enforcement can make itself visible in a multitude of ways, including general criminalization that predominantly targets the non-ruling classes, as well as direct policies that directly protect material interests.
This specific critique asserts that structurally, police forces are unequipped to address those community problems. What tools do they have to improve the communities they occupy, besides criminalization?
There are idealists but I’m not among them ?
Cool hypothetical analysis, except that the actual evidence I pointed out strongly suggests that the police actually aren’t all that hot on property rights, as you claimed they were.
I don’t think any idealist ever claimed to be an idealist.
I’m sorry, I think I was unclear on this. I’m not discussing “property rights”, but “property as the material interests of the ruling class”. I don’t think I’d disagree with you that police aren’t so concerned about property rights (or human rights, in some absurd and obscene cases), especially given the bullshit that is civil forfeiture.
I think you missed the key word in the original post - “Historically”.
Think about the period where societies transitioned from not having a police force to having a police force. Who made that call? Why did they make it?
By my reading (feel free to dispute it), most police forces were initially formed by a ruling class because each maintaining private security for their assets was getting expensive.
Let’s try and keep a reasonable level of discourse here, shall we?
The only thing that makes these sorts of submissions even slightly bearable is if we manage to keep our comments useful.
“Fuck <x>” doesn’t really do that, now does it?
Depends on the perspective.
An example (without backstory of course, just a quick timeline): a cop shoots a child and lies in his statement. Some days after the incident, a video surfaces where it shows that the gun has not fired accidentally. Co-workers also chipped money to get a tv-persona lawyer.
Now, would I be “unfair” if I said fuck cops based on that fact?
Based on the fact alone that his co-workers KNEW what happened and still decided to protect him and after ~8 years he has not yet served jail time, would I still be “unfair” to call him and his co-workers, (where NO ONE EVER STOOD UP because, well, fuck everyone outside the “force”) a bunch of uncivilized pigs (because usual pigs are way more civilized to their community)?
Based on the fact that recently he said that he does not regret a thing, what stance would you have?
Yes.
Even if it’s 100% true as you said, maybe fuck those cops is justified. Fuck all cops absolutely isn’t. Stereotyping isn’t right no matter who you do it to. Going that way makes you no longer a principled objector to injustice, but a promotor of more tribal conflict. No thanks, we have quite enough of that already.
If you followed what I told though, you’d seen that even then, none took a position against them. So in this context, yes, fuck all of them is very appropriate.
I don’t know in what part of the world you live, but in many cases, police officers act like they own everything with higher officials backing them up.
Different experiences yield different point of view. If you had seen seen the equivalent of a police squad beating the shit out of 70-90 year old people while they protest for their pension cuts, and NO ONE getting punished for this, you’d had the same view.
The above also applies to “tribal conflict” you mention. When you (not personally you :) ) fuck someone up completely, you have to consider Newton’s third law, which brilliantly applies to human nature in many cases: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
I’d say that that’s a disturbing story, but without a link to the source it’s just hearsay and only slightly less tiresome than “fuck cops”.
I’d also say that for every handful of cops like that, there are hundreds who are quietly doing their jobs and making their communities better.
I’d also also say that none of that has a damned thing to do with the practice of technology and thus should be somewhere else.
You are correct. So, for reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Greek_riots
The conclusion to draw here is that these sorts of submissions are not even slightly bearable.
“Fuck cops.” is useful, as the banner of one’s unapologetic stance in the face of massive oppressive forces.
Fuck cops.
Alright, more plainly: go fly your ineffectual little banner where it won’t clutter up the place and set further precedent for flaccid, intellectually-light, worthless me-too-ism.
You don’t even differentiate between the different branches of law enforcement, the different units in a given department, the different counties and states and juridstictions. Nah, gee whiz, it’s just “fuck cops o'clock”.
Isn’t it a bit of a double standard to protest for “reasonable levels of discourse”, and follow it up with a vague what-about-ism? I made my perspective very clear in the comment above here, why send this angry and intellectually bankrupt response?
Check the timestamps–your more articulate post didn’t exist when I wrote that reply.
The fact remains: you’d be better off posting materials on how to take direct action against the oppressors than to waste space here by posting “mmmm yeah fuck cops” or “some source I haven’t linked articulates this rather abstract political argument about police”. The problem with both of those is that they are divorced from reality, either because they aren’t actionable (unless you are specifically suggesting intercourse with law enforcement) or because they are too abstract (a critique on how cops further the interest of the ruling class, which is both obvious and useless if you aren’t in the ruling class).
I’d frankly prefer seeing people linking to relevant material and owning that, instead of hiding behind lame outbursts or navel-gazy philosophy–or, perhaps, if it isn’t so important that you want to oppose it with violence, quit bitching.
The middle ground–of both failing to oppose the supposed oppressors and failing to quietly endure them–just leads to noise in otherwise quiet and polite communities.
I’m sorry if I came across as trying to be misleading but I honestly meant this reply; not the comment that followed it.
The issue is that praxis (regardless of the political camp you’re in), must be informed by your beliefs and understandings. I can’t just say “we should do such and such things,” without informing those actions with some sorts of understandings of the systems and situations I’m proposing to act upon.
Not to mention, I’m spending the time I can to write out honest and straightforward responses, but it won’t always be sufficient, and I’d also prefer not to just deflect discussion by stacking the decks with lengthy reads! However, a good introductory read on the relations I touched upon in the linked comments from above would be Wage Labor and Capital; and although I personally embrace a variety of strategies for making the future brighter, I personally agree most with Gilles Dauvé’s writings.
(EDIT: grammar)
Thanks for the links!