Why Plan 9? (2001)
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Why Plan 9? (2001)
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Re: Why Plan 9? (2001)
#2Re: Why Plan 9? (2001)
#3Incidentally, the Raspberry Pi image was recently updated and has better multi-core support. Pretty nice for a near-instant boot terminal, although the non-UNIXness of it becomes a little bit grating when trying to remember how to SSH in a hurry.
(On mobile, so I'll add the link later, but http://taoofmac.com/space/os/Plan9 has my notes)
Re: Why Plan 9? (2001)
#4It's great terminal emulation doesn't exist in Plan9, but with that you lose 99% of terminal application functionality, especially curses.
Re: Why Plan 9? (2001)
#5It's great terminal emulation doesn't exist in Plan9, but with that you lose 99% of terminal application functionality, especially curses.
There's an emulator, IIRC.
Re: Why Plan 9? (2001)
#6It's great terminal emulation doesn't exist in Plan9, but with that you lose 99% of terminal application functionality, especially curses.
People tend to conflate the concept of text based interfaces with terminals and curses but it's possible to have text interfaces without curses. Most plan 9 applications have text interfaces but do not use terminals.
Re: Why Plan 9? (2001)
#7It's great terminal emulation doesn't exist in Plan9, but with that you lose 99% of terminal application functionality, especially curses.
People tend to conflate the concept of text based interfaces with terminals and curses but it's possible to have text interfaces without curses. Most plan 9 applications have text interfaces but do not use terminals.
What's the curses equivalent?
For what it's worth, anything that does more than just print to stdout breaks in 9term.
Re: Why Plan 9? (2001)
#8Re: Why Plan 9? (2001)
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
People tend to conflate the concept of text based interfaces with terminals and curses but it's possible to have text interfaces without curses. Most plan 9 applications have text interfaces but do not use terminals.
What's the curses equivalent? For what it's worth, anything that does more than just print to stdout breaks in 9term.
Windows in plan 9 are images that are drawn to. There are libraries for drawing fonts and various shapes.
Another thing that get conflated with text interfaces is keyboard control. For whatever reason the plan 9 developers were very adverse to this and preferred mouse based interaction.
Anyway plan 9 is interesting because of how it's different. If you're approaching it asking "Where's emacs and vim?" or "Why can't I get my shell history by pressing up?" you're probably not getting the full value out of it. Part of the problem is probably that it's close enough to unix to make people put unix expectations on it.
Here's a video about acme, a programmer's interface for plan 9.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4533156
Check out these man pages. http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/2/window http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/2/graphics http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/2/draw
Re: Why Plan 9? (2001)
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the curses equivalent? For what it's worth, anything that does more than just print to stdout breaks in 9term.
Windows in plan 9 are images that are drawn to. There are libraries for drawing fonts and various shapes. Another thing that get conflated with text interfaces is keyboard control. For whatever reason the plan 9 developers were very adverse to this and preferred mouse based interaction. Anyway plan 9 is interesting because of how it's different. If you're approaching it asking "Where's emacs and vim?" or "Why can't I…
Thanks for the long reply, though I must admit I'm aware of all that. I was hoping for some surprise information.
Your comment of it seeming like Unix might be the key point to take away. I know that I'm supposed to search in the buffer for history and use the mouse to select and rerun it, but having tried it multiple times, I cannot get comfortable with a mutable terminal buffer. That's also why in Emacs I only use term and not the editable terminals. Maybe one day I'll get comfortable.