On 03/02/2016 11:22 AM, Connor Lane Smith wrote: > On 2 March 2016 at 16:06, Greg Reagle <greg.rea...@umbc.edu> wrote: >> Well sam has ISRE, but it lacks a nano/vi/emacs-like (full screen >> interactive) TUI. > > I think the key to *interactive* structural regular expressions is > that it must be possible to position oneself 'within' an expression. > Suppose you write x/re/, then sam will simply print all of the > matching substrings, just as though you'd written x/re/p. So dot does > not reflect the fact that if you added further commands then they > would be performed on each of those matches. In order to be > interactive, it must be possible to write the command interactively, > rather than composing the whole expression in one go and sending it to > the editor to evaluate. That's why multiple cursors are crucial: they > allow you to collect all the matches, then to decide how to *interact* > with them. So I don't agree that sam's structural regular expressions > are interactive in that sense. That's my main complaint.
I see your point. If you do `, x/echo/` samterm highlights only the last match because its paradigm is that there is only one dot/selection. It would be nice if sam had the ability to highlight all matches. But there are tricks to use it more interactively. If you already know these, please excuse me. `, x/echo/ =` prints the location, line number(s) and column number(s), of every match. You can double click on these results (albeit one at a time) and "send" to highlight each match. You can undo any change in case it's not what you want.