continuing the offtopic: You say it sounds like an interesting method at first, but then you try it out and it's weird and slow. How much of a try did you give

continuing the offtopic: You say it sounds like an interesting method at first, but then you try it out and it's weird and slow. How much of a try did you give these editors? In the same way that a new Vim user will basically use the arrow keys, "i", ":w", and ":q" and nothing else, a new user to Sam or Acme can very easily miss a lot of the power. The Sam language is pretty powerful. For instance, you can use the "X/regexp/ command" form to apply a command over every file whose filename matches the regex, so you can (for instance) make a change to every .c file while leaving README alone. Acme lets you use the same command language, but also lets you execute other arbitrary commands by simply typing them and mid-clicking on them--yes, I know Vi lets you do something similar, but with Acme you'll typically build up a "guide" file, full of convenient commands that you just sweep over with the middle mouse button and release to execute. Acme also presents files in a sort of tiling window manager fashion that makes it one of the most convenient editors I've used. I'll frequently have up to about 50 files open, which in Emacs or Vi would drive me nuts trying to constantly switch around them or split the screen into one or two panels (oh boy, C-x b!). In Acme, I can always see the titles of the individual buffers, and if I need to see into the file I can with a mouse click or two expand the buffer into a convenient size. I think one change that could really have a big impact is making the ESC key switch back to the command window; this makes things a lot more familiar for Vi-heads, and it makes sense to eliminate a mouse movement for something that simple and frequent. That ended up a lot longer than I intended, but I wanted to try and share a little bit of my thoughts on Acme and Sam, and encourage others to give them a more thorough try. At this point, I use vi for quick edits, but when I have to write a lot or make a lot of changes, I bring out Acme. When I'm stuck on a strange system that's not my own, I have a tarball of an old version of Sam which, with a little tweaking, has compiled on every version of Unix I've had to use.