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Plan 9 from User Space

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Re: Plan 9 from User Space

#51

Post by pjmlp »

JHonaker wrote: post #5

After a brief diversion with the Acme editor (a big part of Plan 9) and some modern Smalltalk environments (Squeak, Cuis, and Pharo), I can't help but feel like we are stuck in a very local optimum as far as UI/UX go. The insane amount of introspection available to you in a Smalltalk image, and the way every bit of text becomes a potential button or action in Acme just put the lack of creativity in modern interfaces.…

You would love Oberon, and its derived OSes, Acme UI is based on it.

In Oberon, you can select any piece of text and apply a command on it.

Commands are public procedures in dynamic modules, so Module.Command will load it if not already loaded, and then execute command.

There are a couple of ways to write commands, depending if the act on selected widgets, selected text, selected windows, or if they ask for additional input.

http://www.projectoberon.net/

For trying out it emulated on the browser,

https://github.com/schierlm/OberonEmulator

And how the latest iteration of it, Bluebottle (AOS) with Active Oberon, looks like

http://www.progtools.org/article.php?name=oberon&section=com...

One of the great things about PowerShell and Windows, is that despite all the warts it has, it allows exactly a similar kind of workflow, with .NET, DLLs and COM replacing that Module.Command experience.

GNOME and KDE can offer similar workflows, alongside DBUS, and fish shell, however people seem more keen in keeping the UNIX experience of yore instead of going down that route.

Re: Plan 9 from User Space

#52

Post by pjmlp »

JHonaker wrote: post #20
Paul-Craft wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could say much the same thing about emacs and vim as well. emacs, in particular, is essentially nothing more than the elisp interpreter, with some good primitives to build a (some say mediocre) text editor inside a pretty cool operating system. What sort of "weird" do you think would be fun?

I have been using Emacs as my daily driver for about a decade. It's the closest thing we have to a "popular" Smalltalk environment. The desire to bring everything into Emacs is the same desire I felt after experiencing what computing could be in Smalltalk. One of the really striking things that you're confronted with in a modern Smalltalk is the Morphic UI system. Imagine that, with one click, you could drop into a n…

Java and .NET are much closer to Smalltalk than Emacs.

Re: Plan 9 from User Space

#53

Post by infinite8s »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #42
infinite8s wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In sheer volume, there are probably more people doing XeroxPARC level crazy stuff now than then. I'm not sure about that. From the Computer History Museum's 50th anniversary event of the Alto two days ago, each Alto cost about 18k in early 1970s dollars (about 100k today). And they built hundreds of them. Not sure anyone has the budget to do the level of crazy work that would require the equivalent amount of future…

I think the point that you don't need that level of money anymore. You could do the same level of exotic software on a Raspberry Pi for 50 bucks.

That's because you are thinking equivalent in terms of results. I'm thinking equivalent in terms of ambition.

The point I was making is that doing the equivalent level of 'crazy' work (for it was crazy, the idea of giving everyone the equivalent of a personal pdp-11 in those days) requires equivalent levels of funding. It's just that most people can't imagine what could be computed on a $100k equivalent of computing today.

For all of us who grew up in the days of personal computing, it's hard to imagine that what they accomplished as being crazy.

Re: Plan 9 from User Space

#54

Post by 0x445442 »

LukeShu wrote: post #48
0x445442 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think that way but modern mice and touchpads along with the relevant literature have convinced me that keyboard paired with mouse is more productive.

Keyboard with some mouse sprinkled in, sure. But Acme is very mouse heavy.

I guess I’m challenging the assertion that mostly keyboard with mouse sprinkled in is more efficient than more heavily mouse oriented UIs. There is literature that suggests otherwise and that literature was not based off state of the art mouse and touch pad technologies.

Re: Plan 9 from User Space

#55

Post by butterisgood »

LukeShu wrote: post #44
JHonaker wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, I was really just trying to say, Acme is part of the Plan 9 ecosystem for people that have never heard of either. For me at least, Acme is the quintessential P9 application, but I concede that it's Sam for most P9ers in history. It's probably more apt to say Acme is an excellent exemplar of the Plan 9 way. The file-based socket-y proto-RPC "plugin" way of doing things is intimately tied to Plan 9's design. And y…

I think the chain of influence flows from ex/vi to sam, not the other way around?

ed -> jim -> sam(antha)

from: https://9p.io/sys/doc/sam/sam.html

Re: Plan 9 from User Space

#56

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

Paul-Craft wrote: post #8
JHonaker wrote: post #5

After a brief diversion with the Acme editor (a big part of Plan 9) and some modern Smalltalk environments (Squeak, Cuis, and Pharo), I can't help but feel like we are stuck in a very local optimum as far as UI/UX go. The insane amount of introspection available to you in a Smalltalk image, and the way every bit of text becomes a potential button or action in Acme just put the lack of creativity in modern interfaces.…

One could say much the same thing about emacs and vim as well. emacs, in particular, is essentially nothing more than the elisp interpreter, with some good primitives to build a (some say mediocre) text editor inside a pretty cool operating system. What sort of "weird" do you think would be fun?

Not OP, but what about something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metisse ?

( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt3q7Z7RjIU 4min54sec)

Which begat https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1166253.1166301 from the same institution. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUUtiOWTzz4 7min20sec)

Married with something like https://arcan-fe.com/about/

With some https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface sprinkled in,

not necessarily in the 'style' of https://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/ but the concept.

Rounded with something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenQwaq , or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cobalt

OFC fully themable like GTK before they broke it, or something like https://github.com/KDE/qtcurve which is endlessly modifiable.

Nirvana!

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