Sam (text editor)

Multi-file text editor Sam is a multi-file text editor based on structural regular expressions. It was originally designed in the early 1980s at Bell Labs by Rob Pike with the help of Ken Thompson and other Unix developers for the Blit windowing terminal running on v9 Unix; it was later ported to other systems. Sam follows a classical modular Unix aesthetic. It is internally simple, its power leveraged by the composability of a small command language and extensibility through shell integration. Design and features Sam is designed as two synchronous programs: a command interpreter and a mouse-oriented bitmap windowing interface. The interpreter's command set is modeled after the UNIX editor ed and may be used to operate the editor from a standard text terminal. By default, however, Sam presents its own graphical user interface (GUI) window, samterm, which additionally allows point-and-click operations through pop-up context menus. This two-process structure allowed sam to access files on networked host systems through remote execution of the file-access process while running the windowing interface locally, thereby bypassing latency over slow connections. Samterm presents windows to