Hi everybody, Wow, thanks for such an active and thoughtful discussion! I will share my motivations (the "why?" part) later. However, I think I should stress that I was actually thinking of porting **only the CLI / line editor part** of Sam. The GUI, while being really enjoyable to use, doesn't seem that relevant in the DOS world.
Thus this "Sam for DOS" would work basically like Unix's 'ed' or 'edlin'. No GUI, just a line editor utilizing Sam's command language. I have used the **CLI part** of Sam under Windows' command prompt, so I know it works there. Steve, a guy from the Plan9 community, wrote the other day: "I do think I build the backend of sam on MSDOS back in the day, it was most probably the 1st edition plan9 code which was released as a seperate package (with X11 libraries). (still kicking around on netlib: http://www.netlib.org/research/)" So there has "probably" been an effort in the past, which is why I was thinking maybe it's not hard to reincarate. Sam's a lovely editor, feels simpler and cleaner to use than e.g. 'ed'. It has less commands than 'ed', but at the same time, structural regular expressions allow one to to complicated things in a recursive manner. In Sam, the essential operating unit is not a "line", but an expression, so it's better suited for manipulating e.g. paragraphs of text. Also, some say it is really great to use when you need to edit multiple files at a time. For that, there's the 'X' command -- see this cheat sheet for an overview of the command language: http://sam.cat-v.org/cheatsheet/sam-refcard.pdf I'm not a programmer, but I've always had a soft spot for line editors. The hypothesis is that maybe they force me to think and use language in a different manner, as compared to using a "screen editor". Quoting Ken Thompson, on the superiority of ed over vi or emacs: "I've seen [visual] editors like that, but I don't feel a need for them. I don't want to see the state of the file when I'm editing." Sure, this may sound provocative these days (also, it's a single quote without surrounding context). I'm not a programmer, let alone one whose job is writing programs with huge codebases. I am also pretty sure I'm not Ken Thompson. But it is an interesting thing to think about nonetheless. Best, Mart On Mon, 21 Jun 2021 at 22:53, Lukas Satin <luke.sa...@gmail.com> wrote: > > BTW: DOjS is a piece of cake. I develop MS-DOS games since I was 8 years old > (simple 16 colors). DOjS is based on Allegro, I worked on one Allegro game > (Lunar lander clone) as a student within a team of other students. So it is > just a matter of taking the regex stuff and some support for the syntax. It > is TUI, not GUI. > > On Mon, Jun 21, 2021 at 9:49 PM Lukas Satin <luke.sa...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> @Tom I pointed out to Mart to try it himself. I think there is a high chance >> that it will work. >> >> Haha, the minimum wage - someone can do it as a part time project. I don't >> want to start this discussion, but minimum wage in Germany is not even >> junior software developer salary in Ostrava (Czechia), my hometown. I >> started as Java developer in Tieto (owned by Finland) in Ostrava and my >> salary was half of your minimum wage! And we live next to each other. This >> was only 8 years ago. That I quit after 3 months was something else, but >> Ostrava companies always made me upset. They work directly for Germany or >> under Germany and even after 10 years experience and working for Dubai >> blockchain startup, they offered me very low salary. I decided not to >> support this, packed my "two bags" and travelled 3 hours by train to Prague. >> Now I have 3 times higher salary than in my hometown (difference in rent is >> very small). So to end up this in a positive way: there are many people in >> Europe who work for lower salary than German average and I'm sure they could >> do it. Therefore it is doable :-) Have a nice day! >> >> On Mon, Jun 21, 2021 at 9:16 PM tom ehlert <t...@drivesnapshot.de> wrote: >>> >>> >>> > The only light at the end of the tunnel right now is something like >>> > HX DOS, which allows you to run SIMPLE Win32 apps in DOS. Give it a >>> > try: https://www.japheth.de/HX.html >>> >>> DOES IT WORK IN A REASONABLE WAY? >>> >>> >>> >>> > More realistic solution would be to crowdfund some developer to >>> > write a DOS port in something like https://github.com/SuperIlu/DOjS >>> > (but I'm not sure about performance on 486 and lower, running Pentium 1 >>> > would be more safe). >>> >>> have you even the slightest ide how nuch time it takes to write a DOS >>> port? multiply this by the minimum wage law of your country. >>> >>> >>> maybe Jim Hall should it port on his video channel. >>> >>> >>> > Try to run it in FreeDOS again using HX GUI / HX RT. >>> did this work for you? >>> >>> Tom >>> >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Freedos-user mailing list >>> Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net >>> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user > > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
