36 ms·

How I Switched to Plan 9

313 points by Seirdy 7y ago

ianai 7y ago
Blows my mind how so much really is text manipulation. Not every thing though!
- keyle 7y ago
  What does he mean by text manipulation?
  - ianai 7y ago
    Writing email. Viewing logs. Configuring servers. Setting reminders can be done in cron. Probably lots I don’t know about offhand too.
  - monocasa 7y ago
    So, like how in Linux, a lot of system manipulation is presented as psuedo text files in /proc and and /sys, but expanded to the rest of the system. So like the window manager is manipulated by creating fake files (fake as in they don't exist in any persistent storage device) and writing text to them that describes the state of the windows. Rather than socket() and setsockopt(), under the hood it's opening something like /dev/net/tcp/google.com/80/ctrl and reading and writing text about the state of the connection. Because of this the whole system is introspectable via cating interesting files.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- smabie 7y ago
  But, honestly, should it be? I personally find the idea of programming through text editors and files to be archaic and primitive. Superior models have been presented (Smalltalk, Lisp), but unfortunately have never caught on.
  - disposedtrolley 7y ago
    I agree. Program execution is rarely linear too in a codebase of any real size, so viewing the source of a program as a linear page of text doesn't make much sense. I think there's an opportunity for a big player in the dev tools space to create a mainstream visual programming language and associated tooling. Many are trying, like Luna (https://github.com/luna/luna-studio https://github.com/luna/luna-studio) and Dark (https://darklang.com/ https://darklang.com/) but I'm worried they're not established enough to gain traction. Unfortunately programming with a text editor has become so mainstream that investing time in learning potentially better tools nets a lot of friction and not to much gain.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      IDEs, shader editors, game design languages like Blueprint, LabVIEW are examples of mainstream tooling that aren't purely text based.
      - disposedtrolley 7y ago
        True, but I don’t think there’s a general purpose programming language whose tooling expresses source code as visual flows of data, that people would use in place of Go, Python etc.
        lonelappde 7y ago
        You mean like Scratch? Everybody thinks they want that until they try it on a real non-toy problem. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_programming https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_programming
        pjmlp 7y ago
        As someone that also has a background in digital circuits tooling, I think that the problem is the spaghetti codding that usually leads to monoliths. While on text based languages, lack of modularity is kind of hidden and only jumps at you when you try to actually change anything, on visual languages it jumps right at you when you open a project. Ideally, anything that requires panning or zooming, should be packed into their own little reusable building block, instead many try to package as much as they can into a single screen.
- m463 7y ago
  so... does plan 9 do emojis?
  - kick 7y ago
    It does: Plan 9 was one of the first operating systems (probably the first) to go all-in on UTF-8
    - Shugyousha 7y ago
      Actually, it was Ken Thompson and Rob Pike working on Plan9 who invented UTF-8.
- prodip002 7y ago
  Good
- skocznymroczny 7y ago
  It's an interesting concept, and probably appeals to the Bash wizards, but I don't think it's the way forward. I think a more modern alternative would be to have all system components expose a standarized API, kind of like REST endpoints for the OS. The reply could be standarized binary or even JSON. It would still be better than text, and much easier to parse.
  - throwaway5d097 7y ago
    9p is perhaps a bit more advanced/clean/general? than REST endpoints/HTTP. You can still use whatever serializable formats you want.
kylek 7y ago
I have an odd fascination with people who manage to use Plan 9 (they strike me as delightfully insane). It feels like I'm going down a Discordian reality tunnel whenever I read things like this.
- jethro_tell 7y ago
  Every time I always want the article 'WHY I Switched to Plan 9'
  - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
    "Because it’s there" (George Mallory, when asked why climb Mt. Everest). Some people look for the most exotic art. Some people seek the most unusual foods. Some people want to know exactly what's out there in the universe (enough for humanity to keep chucking probes into deep space, no less). And, some people want to use their computer in a new way. Some of those people even end up deriving practical value from the exercise, but I would hesitate to claim that that's the reason we do it:)
  - richardw 7y ago
    My guess, and paraphrasing: it's like software that blocks out distractions. No modern web, he stays mostly focused on his job, which is writing. The software works in a way that suits his sensibilities - consistent, minimalist, quirky, undistracted by FB and Youtube. "More UNIX than UNIX", if you will. Some people eat aeroplanes. He uses Plan9.
  - yiyus 7y ago
    If you have made the switch from Windows to Linux, you probably have got that feeling of satisfaction, of things working as expected. Maybe getting everything working was harder, but it felt right. That is the feeling you get when you switch from Linux (or other Unix) to Plan 9. Yes, you lack a web browser, but it is a beautiful system. Then, there are a reduced group of people (like sl) for whom this beautiful system just works. It is the same reason people write programs using lambda calculus or make fundamental physics research instead of engineering. We even get something useful from it from time to time, but that is just a very nice side effect. Or, as Feynman put it: "it's like sex, it may give some practical results, but that is not why we do it".
sjm 7y ago
> With the exception of multimedia and the modern web, all my needs are met. Bit of a deal-breaker for me, personally.
- jethro_tell 7y ago
  I'm a bit of a luddite and a terminal junkie, and I would say that 'multimedia and the modern web' is still pushing 40-50% of my computer use.
- el_cujo 7y ago
  Even for a work computer, if I can't easily open, say, Stack Overflow then it's a non-starter.
xixixao 7y ago
The sam editor is interesting. I use iterm and tmux over mosh, has anyone figured out a simple text editor that supports cursor based cut and paste? I really just want a notepad-like editor, for the rare cases I’m not using Sublime/Atom/VSCode for a remote. Come to think of it, I also want cursor based cut and paste on the command line, and don’t understand why that’s not the default in 2019, and we’re all pretending that we have a physical tele-typewriter.
- npmn2 7y ago
  Try using vscode remote over ssh, it connects to the machine over ssh and the experience is mostly seamless. Highly recommended.
  - bityard 7y ago
    Last I checked, it does far more than just connect to the machine over SSH. It pushes up a nodejs executable and then also pulls down other stuff from the web. And it will also leave an agent running on the host you ssh into, even after you exit vscode. I can see this being okayish when logging into a dev EC2 instance or something ephemeral but it's not something I would ever want to do on something important.
- tyingq 7y ago
  There's a clone of notepad++ that works on Linux, called notepadqq. https://notepadqq.com/wp/ https://notepadqq.com/wp/
- dexen 7y ago
  Plan 9's Acme (a GUI editor similar to sam) is just fine when ran over LAN - no felt lag at all. Not sure how well it handles modern-day internet, but quite possibly would be practical. And yes, it uses mouse-based select/cut/copy/paste, with line- and block- level operations.
- skykooler 7y ago
  While it may or may not be a "simple" text editor, Vim supports cursor based cut and paste with the appropriate settings in .vimrc (I forget off the top of my head, it's something along the lines of "set mouse=a" to enable the mouse and then "set clipboard=unnamedplus" to make it interface with the system clipboard.)
EdwardDiego 7y ago
> Even one accessed over SSH from an inferior operating system ...and I stopped reading right there. Different doesn't mean worse.
- boomboomsubban 7y ago
  If one feels that Plan 9 is the best OS, every other one would be inferior. Worse doesn't mean bad.
- bityard 7y ago
  Hyperbole doesn't mean insulting
- millstone 7y ago
  Ah, no threat here. This post isn't a salvo in the platform war. Plan9 is not going to displace Android/iOS/macOS/Linux/Windows/ChromeOS/whatever.
- frou_dh 7y ago
  Why do people think anyone else is interested that they stopped reading?
sprash 7y ago
The reliance on a three button button mouse (buttons which sometimes need to be chorded) makes plan9 impossible to use on any modern Laptop. Many other aspects of the UI are completely idiotic (like pixel perfect mouse selection of words to execute commands). Which is a real shame because everything besides the UI is really great. But it seems like the elitist community is perfectly happy with the fact that nobody uses their software.
- ggm 7y ago
  I think you said one good thing (the mouse is a problem) and one bad thing (the accusation of elitism) The people who did plan9 did not do this, to support other people. It was a self-supporting community. If that imposes barriers which make it hard for others, its not elitism in the sense I understand it, because the barrier is functional not based on any other entry score, such as 'who you know' or 'what school you went to' -You just have to make a matching investment, to their investment. I have a lot of respect for these people. I have never interacted directly with them beyond the tokenistic, despite my obscurity no mail of substance I have sent to them in times past was ignored, and if the answer didn't satisfy it was usually because I (like you) assumed they had acquired obligations and burdens facing me, regarding this code. They're not looking for happiness in your use of this code, or your non-use of this code. They're looking for higher functional outcomes from things proved in this code which now filter out in other ways.
  - sprash 7y ago
    The people working on or using plan9 (front) today are different. Just look at the cat-v harmful section and you'll see the blatant elitism. They will keep the completely flawed concepts like the chorded mouse interface for ever for two reasons: 1. To keep normal people out 2. Because their "gods" (Richie, Pike, Kernighan, ...) can't ever be wrong. Claiming otherwise would be heresy.
    - kick 7y ago
      Joking hyperbole isn't elitism, and the chorded mouse interface was repeatedly shown (with user studies and everything!) to be faster than a keyboard-oriented interface.
dexen 7y ago
Plan 9 as a whole is a pretty good IDE for general development - excels at C, shell scripts, Go, and similar. Having been created explicitly to OS differs from older (POSIX/VMS era) OSes by making GUI, architecture portability, namespaces, user-level filesystems, software services, network transparency and distributed computing first-order concerns. For those unable to switch outright, I wholeheartedly recommend plan9port[0] - an almost complete set of utilities and protocols from Plan 9, ported to run in Linux, MacOS X, and OpenBSD userspace. It's being actively developed[1] by the 9fans community. plan9port comes with both sam and acme[2] programmers' text editors. -- [0] https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/ https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/ [1] https://github.com/9fans/plan9port https://github.com/9fans/plan9port [2] https://youtu.be/dP1xVpMPn8M https://youtu.be/dP1xVpMPn8M
- dandelo1953 7y ago
  I know I can google this, but I am really looking for a more personal answer that others might also gleam insight from. What are the efforts like for non x86 architectures, if any exist? Are there working kernels for arm as there is for *nix with things like Raspberry Pi? I haven't started my IoT journey yet. I am wondering if plan9 would be stable enough to tinker with in that space and in order to capture two birds with one trap. [edits made to cleaned up the original mess]
  - dexen 7y ago
    Certainly runs on Raspberry Pi - there are several mentions to that effect. Sadly I can't help you more - best ask on mailing lists[0] or on IRC[1]. Historically Plan 9 was developed from grounds up to support several architectures, so in this case you're really asking about drivers for specific peripherals. -- [0] http://mail.9fans.net/listinfo/9fans http://mail.9fans.net/listinfo/9fans and http://lists.9front.org/ http://lists.9front.org/ [1] #plan9 and #9front and #cat-v on irc.freenode.org
  - Seirdy 7y ago
    9front runs wonderfully well on the Pi and other SBCs. #cat-v on OFTC is very helpful if you want to try it out.
nycticorax 7y ago
That this is the top story on HN currently is one of those things that makes me think I should just stop looking at HN. Look, if you want to use Plan 9, go nuts. Follow your bliss. I guess. But the slice of humanity that finds this to be an appealing option is such a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of the total. How is this relevant to any vaguely reasonable person's life? Why would anyone upvote this Quixotic nonsense? Plan 9 may the be operating system analog of pumpkin pie, but what could it possibly matter given that it has zero ecosystem and zero uptake? Jeezum frigging crow. Give it up. It's dead. Although I guess one nice thing is that is puts in perspective the fact that stories about tiled window managers and/or Arch Linux and/or God knows what else are always showing up on HN. Kind of like when you see someone, who you can never understand what the hell they're jabbering about, give a talk about something you already know, and you realize that there's no way in hell you would have understood the topic based on what just came out of their mouth. Which is clarifying, because it reveals that they just suck at explaining things, and it's not just that you yourself are a dumbass.
- abhayb 7y ago
  This is exactly what I want to see on HN. Exactly because I will never use Plan 9. It makes me happy to know that someone, somewhere, is using it. Providing an existence proof that even something this unwieldy and obscure is for one glorious moment useful in 2019.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- devinus 7y ago
  This is the kind of content that would be #1 years ago before HN became about regurgitating news about acquisitions in Silicon Valley. Remember that it's Hacker News you're reading. I welcome a return to those days.
- vikingcaffiene 7y ago
  Its at the top of HN because its geeky and fun. For some of us this stuff is a hobby just as much as its a career.
- 7y ago
facorreia 7y ago
”Is there support for playing video? No. (...) Watch this introductory video: https://youtu.be/6m3GuoaxRNM" https://youtu.be/6m3GuoaxRNM" I think I'll pass.
ggm 7y ago
I don't have to use plan9 to value what the 9fans did. I don't have to use plan9 to secure the benefit of exploring models of software, systems, networks which plan9 explored. I think that you have to swim very strongly across some currents, to decide to "be" in plan9, but its no different in that sense to choosing to live behind a Nokia brick phone, or only using pen and paper in meetings. Others may work effectively in their kanban on a laptop, but the decision to stop using the parts of your brain which type, and instead use the parts of your brain which shape semantic intent, by writing, is quite large. And in that sense, deciding to use plan9, or even just a tiling window manager, or to disable image load in web by default, or to use Markdown or Org mode to do thing instead of reaching for some packaged electron app, or to focus on GO or Haskell or whatever the thing is, which forces you to think about what you are doing in code, That decision may be swimming against the stream, but its big. Plan9 is big. Its not for everyone, and I decided not to invest because it had moving parts I didn't feel confident I understood and at the time I looked at it, was wedded to multiple independent instances of boxes I didn't own. Now, it is probably entirely possible inside containers or VMs or something, but I am content to know I could. (I am however, using pen and paper more in meetings)
- dangom 7y ago
  This is an insightful observation. What are your thoughts regarding why most choose to swim with the stream, instead of exploring other models?
  - ggm 7y ago
    It's significantly easier to get to team-based outcomes if you can adhere to a common platform. Finding a common platform by swimming against the stream is just harder. Larger enterprises, which can provide jobs, tend to want team. The history of science/technology is littered with companies which had the courage to give small groups of people budget and time, to do things. We don't often hear about the failures, but I am sure there are many. Bell happened to be one of those companies. You could walk into another door in Bell (or AT&T) and drive to a room much less tolerant of swimming against the stream.
lifeisstillgood 7y ago
To me this is part of a need to integrate my digital life. I understand the swimming against the tide here (recovering FreeBSD laptop user) - because an integrated life is a controllable life I want tools before I want services I want an agent that has access to my digital life where ever that is. I want that agent to be the expression of my tools - that is my first and possibly only service I want my mobile device to keep and give me access to my digital footprint - my phone calls, text, gps locations. I want a message in Whatsapp and in facebook and in email to just be a message. if that breaks someone's business model I do t care. I want to be able to review my digital actions - what was the name of the video I stupidly watched at 1am last night - let me review that each week so I can improve my behaviour - not have my behaviour controlled I want this for each member of my family too
- Reelin 7y ago
  You've managed to put into words something that really bothers me about how software and devices are designed and used at present. An extension of my physical being (which is increasingly how devices are used) should probably be as independent as possible, not a third party service. > I want to be able to review my digital actions - what was the name of the video I stupidly watched at 1am last night - let me review that each week so I can improve my behaviour - not have my behaviour controlled It's almost 2020. Forget the flying car, why does my web browser still not provide full text history search if I want it? It's text, and this isn't the 1980s! Why can't it snapshot the textual portion of the DOM for each page I visit if that's what I want? Half terabyte SSDs with 700 MB/s sustained write are $80!
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    That came, worked very nicely, then went with the first version or two of Google desktop search. Would search web history, local documents - word and excel included, and present it in an interface much like Google search at the time. Far as I remember all data was kept locally - it wasn't the Googleplex hoovering up yet another terabyte of your data trail or I wouldn't have touched it. Then it started to deprecate the useful part, gain a GUI, and morph into a second-rate widget engine. By the last couple of versions I came across it was a mostly useless, very second rate copy of Konfabulator (later Yahoo Widgets). It no longer had any local document and web indexing.
beagle3 7y ago
While we are at it - is there anything like plan 9’a factotum for Linux or OpenBSD? I’ve been reading about plan9’s security model over the last week, and I like it, but can’t find a modern isable port to an os I use. Oauth/oauth2 are sort of a web equivalent but not really, first because they are web, and 2nd because they aren’t useful for things like pop3 in the same way that factotum is. (And it would be really great if factotum would list permissions for apps that would support that thing, but... you can’t win them all)
- throwaway5d097 7y ago
  I guess you can run it on Linux/BSD with plan9port
rcarmo 7y ago
I played around with it for a year or so (had three consecutive Raspberry Pis running it as a VNC/SSH console and general tinkering machine), and quite enjoyed it, except for two things that turned out to be the ultimate dealbreakers: * no truly useful self-hosted browser (when you can’t even log on to your home router to troubleshoot things, an always-on console is useless) * mouse chording (I understand the history of it, but it was a constant pain) I would have loved to (for instance) hack my Chromebook into running Plan 9 natively, but being fundamentally unable to use it without an external mouse made it impossible. And no, key combos are not the answer here. Another thing I played around with was running Inferno on the Pi (I have a bunch of resources for both listed on https://taoofmac.com/space/os/Plan9 https://taoofmac.com/space/os/Plan9), and that was a lot of fun (for the low-level stuff). Now for the controversial bit: Porting a full browser to Plan9 is not likely to ever happen, but I do wish the community would make an attempt at modernizing it ever so slightly rather than assuming it’s perfect (I’m on the 9fans mailing-list, and it is a fascinating cross-sample of hard-boiled traditionalists and almost ascetic pragmatists)
ddtaylor 7y ago
Server is giving the following error: > Error code: MOZILLA_PKIX_ERROR_SELF_SIGNED_CERT It's available via this HTTPS mirror if needed: https://archive.is/bVfPc https://archive.is/bVfPc
jonathanwallace 7y ago
> Is there support for playing video? No. That could change in the near future. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTU7iLuv6g4&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTU7iLuv6g4&feature=youtu.be
- smorrow 7y ago
  What has this got to do with Plan 9?
TomMasz 7y ago
I run Plan 9 in a VM now and then which means I've never gotten that far into it. It seems very much like a solution to a problem that I've never had and as such doesn't do much for me. The article's author is a writer by trade and uses his laptop like a typewriter. Plan 9 certainly does that well and it's free of the many distractions that come with other OSs, so good for him.
forgotpwd16 7y ago
>9front ships with two web browsers, both written as jokes and abandoned by their authors in prior decades. Neither of them support Javascript, CSS, or anything beyond a meager subset of HTML. The dealbreaker for the vast majority of users still remains then. If I recall correctly though when I tested it some time ago there was a software making possible to run Linux binaries and it could be used to run Opera. Isn't this possible anymore?
mrtweetyhack 7y ago
This is stupid

313 points by Seirdy 7y ago

ianai 7y ago

Blows my mind how so much really is text manipulation. Not every thing though!

keyle 7y ago
What does he mean by text manipulation?
- ianai 7y ago
  Writing email. Viewing logs. Configuring servers. Setting reminders can be done in cron. Probably lots I don’t know about offhand too.
- monocasa 7y ago
  So, like how in Linux, a lot of system manipulation is presented as psuedo text files in /proc and and /sys, but expanded to the rest of the system. So like the window manager is manipulated by creating fake files (fake as in they don't exist in any persistent storage device) and writing text to them that describes the state of the windows. Rather than socket() and setsockopt(), under the hood it's opening something like /dev/net/tcp/google.com/80/ctrl and reading and writing text about the state of the connection. Because of this the whole system is introspectable via cating interesting files.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
smabie 7y ago
But, honestly, should it be? I personally find the idea of programming through text editors and files to be archaic and primitive. Superior models have been presented (Smalltalk, Lisp), but unfortunately have never caught on.
- disposedtrolley 7y ago
  I agree. Program execution is rarely linear too in a codebase of any real size, so viewing the source of a program as a linear page of text doesn't make much sense. I think there's an opportunity for a big player in the dev tools space to create a mainstream visual programming language and associated tooling. Many are trying, like Luna (https://github.com/luna/luna-studio https://github.com/luna/luna-studio) and Dark (https://darklang.com/ https://darklang.com/) but I'm worried they're not established enough to gain traction. Unfortunately programming with a text editor has become so mainstream that investing time in learning potentially better tools nets a lot of friction and not to much gain.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    IDEs, shader editors, game design languages like Blueprint, LabVIEW are examples of mainstream tooling that aren't purely text based.
    - disposedtrolley 7y ago
      True, but I don’t think there’s a general purpose programming language whose tooling expresses source code as visual flows of data, that people would use in place of Go, Python etc.
      - lonelappde 7y ago
        You mean like Scratch? Everybody thinks they want that until they try it on a real non-toy problem. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_programming https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_programming
        pjmlp 7y ago
        As someone that also has a background in digital circuits tooling, I think that the problem is the spaghetti codding that usually leads to monoliths. While on text based languages, lack of modularity is kind of hidden and only jumps at you when you try to actually change anything, on visual languages it jumps right at you when you open a project. Ideally, anything that requires panning or zooming, should be packed into their own little reusable building block, instead many try to package as much as they can into a single screen.
m463 7y ago
so... does plan 9 do emojis?
- kick 7y ago
  It does: Plan 9 was one of the first operating systems (probably the first) to go all-in on UTF-8
  - Shugyousha 7y ago
    Actually, it was Ken Thompson and Rob Pike working on Plan9 who invented UTF-8.
prodip002 7y ago
Good
skocznymroczny 7y ago
It's an interesting concept, and probably appeals to the Bash wizards, but I don't think it's the way forward. I think a more modern alternative would be to have all system components expose a standarized API, kind of like REST endpoints for the OS. The reply could be standarized binary or even JSON. It would still be better than text, and much easier to parse.
- throwaway5d097 7y ago
  9p is perhaps a bit more advanced/clean/general? than REST endpoints/HTTP. You can still use whatever serializable formats you want.

kylek 7y ago

I have an odd fascination with people who manage to use Plan 9 (they strike me as delightfully insane). It feels like I'm going down a Discordian reality tunnel whenever I read things like this.

jethro_tell 7y ago
Every time I always want the article 'WHY I Switched to Plan 9'
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  "Because it’s there" (George Mallory, when asked why climb Mt. Everest). Some people look for the most exotic art. Some people seek the most unusual foods. Some people want to know exactly what's out there in the universe (enough for humanity to keep chucking probes into deep space, no less). And, some people want to use their computer in a new way. Some of those people even end up deriving practical value from the exercise, but I would hesitate to claim that that's the reason we do it:)
- richardw 7y ago
  My guess, and paraphrasing: it's like software that blocks out distractions. No modern web, he stays mostly focused on his job, which is writing. The software works in a way that suits his sensibilities - consistent, minimalist, quirky, undistracted by FB and Youtube. "More UNIX than UNIX", if you will. Some people eat aeroplanes. He uses Plan9.
- yiyus 7y ago
  If you have made the switch from Windows to Linux, you probably have got that feeling of satisfaction, of things working as expected. Maybe getting everything working was harder, but it felt right. That is the feeling you get when you switch from Linux (or other Unix) to Plan 9. Yes, you lack a web browser, but it is a beautiful system. Then, there are a reduced group of people (like sl) for whom this beautiful system just works. It is the same reason people write programs using lambda calculus or make fundamental physics research instead of engineering. We even get something useful from it from time to time, but that is just a very nice side effect. Or, as Feynman put it: "it's like sex, it may give some practical results, but that is not why we do it".

sjm 7y ago

> With the exception of multimedia and the modern web, all my needs are met. Bit of a deal-breaker for me, personally.

jethro_tell 7y ago
I'm a bit of a luddite and a terminal junkie, and I would say that 'multimedia and the modern web' is still pushing 40-50% of my computer use.
el_cujo 7y ago
Even for a work computer, if I can't easily open, say, Stack Overflow then it's a non-starter.

xixixao 7y ago

The sam editor is interesting. I use iterm and tmux over mosh, has anyone figured out a simple text editor that supports cursor based cut and paste? I really just want a notepad-like editor, for the rare cases I’m not using Sublime/Atom/VSCode for a remote. Come to think of it, I also want cursor based cut and paste on the command line, and don’t understand why that’s not the default in 2019, and we’re all pretending that we have a physical tele-typewriter.

npmn2 7y ago
Try using vscode remote over ssh, it connects to the machine over ssh and the experience is mostly seamless. Highly recommended.
- bityard 7y ago
  Last I checked, it does far more than just connect to the machine over SSH. It pushes up a nodejs executable and then also pulls down other stuff from the web. And it will also leave an agent running on the host you ssh into, even after you exit vscode. I can see this being okayish when logging into a dev EC2 instance or something ephemeral but it's not something I would ever want to do on something important.
tyingq 7y ago
There's a clone of notepad++ that works on Linux, called notepadqq. https://notepadqq.com/wp/ https://notepadqq.com/wp/
dexen 7y ago
Plan 9's Acme (a GUI editor similar to sam) is just fine when ran over LAN - no felt lag at all. Not sure how well it handles modern-day internet, but quite possibly would be practical. And yes, it uses mouse-based select/cut/copy/paste, with line- and block- level operations.
skykooler 7y ago
While it may or may not be a "simple" text editor, Vim supports cursor based cut and paste with the appropriate settings in .vimrc (I forget off the top of my head, it's something along the lines of "set mouse=a" to enable the mouse and then "set clipboard=unnamedplus" to make it interface with the system clipboard.)

EdwardDiego 7y ago

> Even one accessed over SSH from an inferior operating system ...and I stopped reading right there. Different doesn't mean worse.

boomboomsubban 7y ago
If one feels that Plan 9 is the best OS, every other one would be inferior. Worse doesn't mean bad.
bityard 7y ago
Hyperbole doesn't mean insulting
millstone 7y ago
Ah, no threat here. This post isn't a salvo in the platform war. Plan9 is not going to displace Android/iOS/macOS/Linux/Windows/ChromeOS/whatever.
frou_dh 7y ago
Why do people think anyone else is interested that they stopped reading?

sprash 7y ago

The reliance on a three button button mouse (buttons which sometimes need to be chorded) makes plan9 impossible to use on any modern Laptop. Many other aspects of the UI are completely idiotic (like pixel perfect mouse selection of words to execute commands). Which is a real shame because everything besides the UI is really great. But it seems like the elitist community is perfectly happy with the fact that nobody uses their software.

ggm 7y ago
I think you said one good thing (the mouse is a problem) and one bad thing (the accusation of elitism) The people who did plan9 did not do this, to support other people. It was a self-supporting community. If that imposes barriers which make it hard for others, its not elitism in the sense I understand it, because the barrier is functional not based on any other entry score, such as 'who you know' or 'what school you went to' -You just have to make a matching investment, to their investment. I have a lot of respect for these people. I have never interacted directly with them beyond the tokenistic, despite my obscurity no mail of substance I have sent to them in times past was ignored, and if the answer didn't satisfy it was usually because I (like you) assumed they had acquired obligations and burdens facing me, regarding this code. They're not looking for happiness in your use of this code, or your non-use of this code. They're looking for higher functional outcomes from things proved in this code which now filter out in other ways.
- sprash 7y ago
  The people working on or using plan9 (front) today are different. Just look at the cat-v harmful section and you'll see the blatant elitism. They will keep the completely flawed concepts like the chorded mouse interface for ever for two reasons: 1. To keep normal people out 2. Because their "gods" (Richie, Pike, Kernighan, ...) can't ever be wrong. Claiming otherwise would be heresy.
  - kick 7y ago
    Joking hyperbole isn't elitism, and the chorded mouse interface was repeatedly shown (with user studies and everything!) to be faster than a keyboard-oriented interface.

dexen 7y ago

Plan 9 as a whole is a pretty good IDE for general development - excels at C, shell scripts, Go, and similar. Having been created explicitly to OS differs from older (POSIX/VMS era) OSes by making GUI, architecture portability, namespaces, user-level filesystems, software services, network transparency and distributed computing first-order concerns. For those unable to switch outright, I wholeheartedly recommend plan9port[0] - an almost complete set of utilities and protocols from Plan 9, ported to run in Linux, MacOS X, and OpenBSD userspace. It's being actively developed[1] by the 9fans community. plan9port comes with both sam and acme[2] programmers' text editors. -- [0] https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/ https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/ [1] https://github.com/9fans/plan9port https://github.com/9fans/plan9port [2] https://youtu.be/dP1xVpMPn8M https://youtu.be/dP1xVpMPn8M

dandelo1953 7y ago
I know I can google this, but I am really looking for a more personal answer that others might also gleam insight from. What are the efforts like for non x86 architectures, if any exist? Are there working kernels for arm as there is for *nix with things like Raspberry Pi? I haven't started my IoT journey yet. I am wondering if plan9 would be stable enough to tinker with in that space and in order to capture two birds with one trap. [edits made to cleaned up the original mess]
- dexen 7y ago
  Certainly runs on Raspberry Pi - there are several mentions to that effect. Sadly I can't help you more - best ask on mailing lists[0] or on IRC[1]. Historically Plan 9 was developed from grounds up to support several architectures, so in this case you're really asking about drivers for specific peripherals. -- [0] http://mail.9fans.net/listinfo/9fans http://mail.9fans.net/listinfo/9fans and http://lists.9front.org/ http://lists.9front.org/ [1] #plan9 and #9front and #cat-v on irc.freenode.org
- Seirdy 7y ago
  9front runs wonderfully well on the Pi and other SBCs. #cat-v on OFTC is very helpful if you want to try it out.

nycticorax 7y ago

That this is the top story on HN currently is one of those things that makes me think I should just stop looking at HN. Look, if you want to use Plan 9, go nuts. Follow your bliss. I guess. But the slice of humanity that finds this to be an appealing option is such a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of the total. How is this relevant to any vaguely reasonable person's life? Why would anyone upvote this Quixotic nonsense? Plan 9 may the be operating system analog of pumpkin pie, but what could it possibly matter given that it has zero ecosystem and zero uptake? Jeezum frigging crow. Give it up. It's dead. Although I guess one nice thing is that is puts in perspective the fact that stories about tiled window managers and/or Arch Linux and/or God knows what else are always showing up on HN. Kind of like when you see someone, who you can never understand what the hell they're jabbering about, give a talk about something you already know, and you realize that there's no way in hell you would have understood the topic based on what just came out of their mouth. Which is clarifying, because it reveals that they just suck at explaining things, and it's not just that you yourself are a dumbass.

abhayb 7y ago
This is exactly what I want to see on HN. Exactly because I will never use Plan 9. It makes me happy to know that someone, somewhere, is using it. Providing an existence proof that even something this unwieldy and obscure is for one glorious moment useful in 2019.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
devinus 7y ago
This is the kind of content that would be #1 years ago before HN became about regurgitating news about acquisitions in Silicon Valley. Remember that it's Hacker News you're reading. I welcome a return to those days.
vikingcaffiene 7y ago
Its at the top of HN because its geeky and fun. For some of us this stuff is a hobby just as much as its a career.
7y ago

facorreia 7y ago

”Is there support for playing video? No. (...) Watch this introductory video: https://youtu.be/6m3GuoaxRNM" https://youtu.be/6m3GuoaxRNM" I think I'll pass.

ggm 7y ago

I don't have to use plan9 to value what the 9fans did. I don't have to use plan9 to secure the benefit of exploring models of software, systems, networks which plan9 explored. I think that you have to swim very strongly across some currents, to decide to "be" in plan9, but its no different in that sense to choosing to live behind a Nokia brick phone, or only using pen and paper in meetings. Others may work effectively in their kanban on a laptop, but the decision to stop using the parts of your brain which type, and instead use the parts of your brain which shape semantic intent, by writing, is quite large. And in that sense, deciding to use plan9, or even just a tiling window manager, or to disable image load in web by default, or to use Markdown or Org mode to do thing instead of reaching for some packaged electron app, or to focus on GO or Haskell or whatever the thing is, which forces you to think about what you are doing in code, That decision may be swimming against the stream, but its big. Plan9 is big. Its not for everyone, and I decided not to invest because it had moving parts I didn't feel confident I understood and at the time I looked at it, was wedded to multiple independent instances of boxes I didn't own. Now, it is probably entirely possible inside containers or VMs or something, but I am content to know I could. (I am however, using pen and paper more in meetings)

dangom 7y ago
This is an insightful observation. What are your thoughts regarding why most choose to swim with the stream, instead of exploring other models?
- ggm 7y ago
  It's significantly easier to get to team-based outcomes if you can adhere to a common platform. Finding a common platform by swimming against the stream is just harder. Larger enterprises, which can provide jobs, tend to want team. The history of science/technology is littered with companies which had the courage to give small groups of people budget and time, to do things. We don't often hear about the failures, but I am sure there are many. Bell happened to be one of those companies. You could walk into another door in Bell (or AT&T) and drive to a room much less tolerant of swimming against the stream.

lifeisstillgood 7y ago

To me this is part of a need to integrate my digital life. I understand the swimming against the tide here (recovering FreeBSD laptop user) - because an integrated life is a controllable life I want tools before I want services I want an agent that has access to my digital life where ever that is. I want that agent to be the expression of my tools - that is my first and possibly only service I want my mobile device to keep and give me access to my digital footprint - my phone calls, text, gps locations. I want a message in Whatsapp and in facebook and in email to just be a message. if that breaks someone's business model I do t care. I want to be able to review my digital actions - what was the name of the video I stupidly watched at 1am last night - let me review that each week so I can improve my behaviour - not have my behaviour controlled I want this for each member of my family too

Reelin 7y ago
You've managed to put into words something that really bothers me about how software and devices are designed and used at present. An extension of my physical being (which is increasingly how devices are used) should probably be as independent as possible, not a third party service. > I want to be able to review my digital actions - what was the name of the video I stupidly watched at 1am last night - let me review that each week so I can improve my behaviour - not have my behaviour controlled It's almost 2020. Forget the flying car, why does my web browser still not provide full text history search if I want it? It's text, and this isn't the 1980s! Why can't it snapshot the textual portion of the DOM for each page I visit if that's what I want? Half terabyte SSDs with 700 MB/s sustained write are $80!
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  That came, worked very nicely, then went with the first version or two of Google desktop search. Would search web history, local documents - word and excel included, and present it in an interface much like Google search at the time. Far as I remember all data was kept locally - it wasn't the Googleplex hoovering up yet another terabyte of your data trail or I wouldn't have touched it. Then it started to deprecate the useful part, gain a GUI, and morph into a second-rate widget engine. By the last couple of versions I came across it was a mostly useless, very second rate copy of Konfabulator (later Yahoo Widgets). It no longer had any local document and web indexing.

beagle3 7y ago

While we are at it - is there anything like plan 9’a factotum for Linux or OpenBSD? I’ve been reading about plan9’s security model over the last week, and I like it, but can’t find a modern isable port to an os I use. Oauth/oauth2 are sort of a web equivalent but not really, first because they are web, and 2nd because they aren’t useful for things like pop3 in the same way that factotum is. (And it would be really great if factotum would list permissions for apps that would support that thing, but... you can’t win them all)

throwaway5d097 7y ago
I guess you can run it on Linux/BSD with plan9port

rcarmo 7y ago

I played around with it for a year or so (had three consecutive Raspberry Pis running it as a VNC/SSH console and general tinkering machine), and quite enjoyed it, except for two things that turned out to be the ultimate dealbreakers: * no truly useful self-hosted browser (when you can’t even log on to your home router to troubleshoot things, an always-on console is useless) * mouse chording (I understand the history of it, but it was a constant pain) I would have loved to (for instance) hack my Chromebook into running Plan 9 natively, but being fundamentally unable to use it without an external mouse made it impossible. And no, key combos are not the answer here. Another thing I played around with was running Inferno on the Pi (I have a bunch of resources for both listed on https://taoofmac.com/space/os/Plan9 https://taoofmac.com/space/os/Plan9), and that was a lot of fun (for the low-level stuff). Now for the controversial bit: Porting a full browser to Plan9 is not likely to ever happen, but I do wish the community would make an attempt at modernizing it ever so slightly rather than assuming it’s perfect (I’m on the 9fans mailing-list, and it is a fascinating cross-sample of hard-boiled traditionalists and almost ascetic pragmatists)

ddtaylor 7y ago

Server is giving the following error: > Error code: MOZILLA_PKIX_ERROR_SELF_SIGNED_CERT It's available via this HTTPS mirror if needed: https://archive.is/bVfPc https://archive.is/bVfPc

jonathanwallace 7y ago

> Is there support for playing video? No. That could change in the near future. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTU7iLuv6g4&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTU7iLuv6g4&feature=youtu.be

smorrow 7y ago
What has this got to do with Plan 9?

TomMasz 7y ago

I run Plan 9 in a VM now and then which means I've never gotten that far into it. It seems very much like a solution to a problem that I've never had and as such doesn't do much for me. The article's author is a writer by trade and uses his laptop like a typewriter. Plan 9 certainly does that well and it's free of the many distractions that come with other OSs, so good for him.

forgotpwd16 7y ago

>9front ships with two web browsers, both written as jokes and abandoned by their authors in prior decades. Neither of them support Javascript, CSS, or anything beyond a meager subset of HTML. The dealbreaker for the vast majority of users still remains then. If I recall correctly though when I tested it some time ago there was a software making possible to run Linux binaries and it could be used to run Opera. Isn't this possible anymore?

mrtweetyhack 7y ago

This is stupid