[TUHS] upwards from ed (was: End of an era: the last ATC)

[Noel Hunt]

> i write go these days and use dozens of third party libraries.
> zed allows me to ask “what methods are available on this variable?”

Interestingly, 'samuel' has a feature not unlike the above, called
'advisor'.  You can select a string in a file window, and look up
its definition. The manual has

       Advisor
          Advisor is a C advisor service.  It will look-up the
          selected library routine name or C Language keyword (while,
          for, if, etc.) and return (in the command window)
          information about the routine's calling sequence or use.

The inclusion of C language keywords may have been influenced by the
fact that 'samuel' also had an interface to 'cin', the C interpreter.
The 'database' file has a simple format, e.g.,

        Jrect   Bitmap Jrect={0, 0, XMAX, YMAX};
        Point   struct{ short x; short y; }Point;
        add     Point add(p, q) Point p, q; add two points

and the distributions I have seen have come with such files for 630
routines, X11 and C library functions. The 'advisor' was a separate
program, not built in to 'samuel', and I daresay this functionality
could be added to 'acme', via 'libacme'.

On Tue, 22 Jul 2025 at 20:16, Steve Simon <steve at quintile.net> wrote:

> sam was my only editor from 92 when i discovered it until last year.
>
> under continual peer pressure i moved to zed on a mac which does many
> clever things i don’t need and even occasionally gets in the way, but (for
> me) it had one killer feature:
>
> i write go these days and use dozens of third party libraries. zed allows
> me to ask “what methods are available on this variable?”
>
> i would love to go back to sam but i fear adding treesitter and the rest
> needed to support this feature would kill one of us for sure.
>
> -Steve
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