This page does a horrible job of explaining what it's about.
9front “The Golden Age of Ballooning” Released
21–30 of 81 posts
Re: 9front “The Golden Age of Ballooning” Released
#22Re: 9front “The Golden Age of Ballooning” Released
#23This page does a horrible job of explaining what it's about.
Baloons....it's written on top.
Re: 9front “The Golden Age of Ballooning” Released
#24This page does a horrible job of explaining what it's about.
It does, it took me a minute to click on the "fqa" (o; but I absolutely love the design, humour and aesthetic. The web needs more of this oddballness. Dare I say, odd balloon-ness
Re: 9front “The Golden Age of Ballooning” Released
#25This in the front page's legend made me snicker:
"Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!"
Now, what does that remind me of? :)
Re: 9front “The Golden Age of Ballooning” Released
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd say the UI/UX actually isn't that good, period. "Everything is actually really a file this time", plumbing, acme and rio are all very cool and powerful concepts, as is the idea that we shouldn't have to care about silly old TTY intricacies and that the mouse should be a first class citizen in our tools. However, the window management feels rather cumbersome and not offering decent keyboard navigation and shortcut…
Is it an inherent flaw in 9front or could it be fixed with an input router?
The Plan 9 UI is deeply arcane. It's heavily inspired by the Oberon UI, which itself is equally arcane, if not even more so.
I have a play with Inferno in a VM some years ago. (I can't even find an ISO of it now, which is something that needs fixing badly, alongside a ready-to-run version for Linux on x86-64.)
Oberon, and thus Plan 9, spring directly from the era of the original Xerox PARC Alto. Their design comes from before Apple standardised the GUI in the early 1980s, with standardised menu bars, standard window controls in the title bar, the idea of dialog boxes, plus ones that have standard buttons in standard places.
(You know -- all the sort of stuff GNOME is busily removing again now.)
Microsoft mimicked this design in Windows 1 and 2, DR aped it in GEM, IBM in OS/2 1.x, etc. All later GUIs are informed by LisaOS and MacOS 1.
Oberon was before that and it has none of that stuff. Plan 9 loosely mimics Oberon and so it doesn't, either.
Result: it's very weird if all you know are post-1990s GUIs.
Inferno modernised the Plan 9 UI and it's quite usable by comparison. But Inferno is even more obscure than Plan 9.
FWIW, The A2 OS modernised Oberon and it's much more usable, too. Both are still weird but they're vaguely recognisable and you can just start clicking on stuff.
Re: 9front “The Golden Age of Ballooning” Released
#27Re: 9front “The Golden Age of Ballooning” Released
#28This page does a horrible job of explaining what it's about.
Notable changes few, minor changes numerous.
Re: 9front “The Golden Age of Ballooning” Released
#29Can Acme be made to provide code-completion / Intellisense type features, similar to what Java and C# programmers expect? Can it provide a decent REPL, like iPython?
Yes. There's [acme-lsp](https://github.com/fhs/acme-lsp) for providing language server integration and things like "jump to definition", "show hover-help" and so on.
I personally use `autokey` on Linux and `sxhkd` on macOS for adding a key binding for `acme-lsp`'s `Lcomp` command which performs completion.
There's also [Watch](https://pkg.go.dev/9fans.net/go/acme/Watch) for monitoring a directory of files for changes and running a command in a persistent Acme window. I use that for continuously running unit tests while I edit some piece of code, or for automatically running `go generate` and such.
For your REPL needs, there's the `win` command that implements a basic dumb terminal as an Acme window. This provides a few goodies like letting you edit the terminal buffer with Acme's `Edit` command and its embedded Sam command language, as well as adding "snippets" that can be executed with one click of the middle mouse button.
Acme by itself is already plenty useful (`win` is part of the "standard distribution" so to speak, in that it is part of the various Plan9 forks and of plan9port), and a lot of extra stuff can be built rather quickly by hooking into its 9p interface:
For example, my tool to add commonly used tools to the tag (the blue line at the top of each text window that contains the file name and commands that act on the window) is a handful of lines of shell script that parse entries in acme's `acme/log` file and select the appropriate tools to add based on the name of newly opened files.
My Git integration is a thin wrapper around `win` and `git commit --interactive` that pops open a window that allows me to author a Git commit similar to (but a lot simpler than) magit for emacs and fugitive for Vim work.
Even if you're not in Plan9 (or one of the forks), I encourage you to give [plan9port](https://github.com/9fans/plan9port)'s Acme a spin.
(FWIW, this post was written in an Acme window because it's a lot more intuitive to use after some getting used to than regular ol' GTK text boxes used by Firefox.)
Re: 9front “The Golden Age of Ballooning” Released
#30This page does a horrible job of explaining what it's about.
It used to be better but the front fell off.