Sam text editor
Shares rank 38 of 56 text editors by recommenders
A keyboard-driven text editor, akin to a graphical vi, whose structural regular expressions people find more powerful than vi's own.
A keyboard-driven text editor, akin to a graphical vi, whose structural regular expressions people find more powerful than vi's own.
12 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 9
- criticize it
- 3
- approval share
- 75%
Recommended in 8 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 9 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 3 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 8 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Structural regular expressions more powerful than vi
“I consider the Sam regular expresions far more powerful than the vi keys themselves.”
Comment from 18 Feb 2026 in “Terminals should generate the 256-color palette” “I understood structural expressions for Sam/Acme really fast”
Comment from 11 Feb 2026 in “Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability” “much more powerful expressions than Ex/Vi ones”
Comment from 18 Feb 2026 in “Terminals should generate the 256-color palette” Keyboard-driven, vi-like editing
“Sam is very much a keyboard driven modern TUI ed (the standard editor).”
Comment from 23 Aug 2026 in “Stop Making TUIs” “Sam it's like a graphical vi, period, there's nothing alien of it.”
Comment from 28 Mar 2026 in “Cocoa-Way – Native macOS Wayland compositor for running Linux apps seamlessly”
Other text editors people recommend
The four most recommended other text editors, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zed | 700 | 430 | 62% | 13 | 6 mo57 owners | — |
| GNU Emacs | 648 | 207 | 76% | 13 | 20 yrs158 owners | Approved |
| Vim | 513 | 127 | 80% | 13 | 20 yrs55 owners | Approved |
| Visual Studio Code | 485 | 547 | 47% | 12 | 2 yrs13 owners | — |
| Sam text editorThis page | 9 | 3 | 75% | 8 | — | — |
What people said
All 16 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Those were both amazing but so very niche.”
“Sam is very much a keyboard driven modern TUI ed (the standard editor).”
“Open source is not just open weight, even if weights are released under MIT.”
“Their lawyers really love this idea for some reason.”
“Identity preservation worked way better than any dedicated tracker I'd used before but it only ran at 1–2 fps”
“When I swapped SAM 2 for SAM 3 the whole system improved without touching anything else.”
“their non-LLM things are more important and relevant, like their SAM models”
“I'd recommend both if you haven't”
“Sam it's like a graphical vi, period, there's nothing alien of it.”
“I consider the Sam regular expresions far more powerful than the vi keys themselves.”
“much more powerful expressions than Ex/Vi ones”
“I understood structural expressions for Sam/Acme really fast”
“far more valuable to the ecosystem than more AIaaS”
“the other text editors (sam, acme) didn't worked”
“The new SAM (segment anything) and SAM3D are actually impressive”
“Checkout https://github.com/MiscellaneousStuff/meta-sam-demo”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.