3 ms·
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
by dmm 10y ago
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 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/window
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/2/graphics http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/2/graphics
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/2/draw http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/2/draw
- cm3 10y agoThanks 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.