> (a big part of Plan 9) It's the first thing many plan 9 users run after they experience their first grey Rio screen and figure out how to draw a window. It a

> (a big part of Plan 9) It's the first thing many plan 9 users run after they experience their first grey Rio screen and figure out how to draw a window. It also demonstrates the power of the file system based interface and how a program can expose its internal functionality via files to external programs to build a symbiotic environment. But most will find it cumbersome or obtuse to use after a while. Another major gripe is that it cant do graphics in its windows which is kid of seen as a break in the design from being a graphics first OS. Personally I always felt it's the equivalent of the Explorer shell for Plan 9. My gripe with it is it becomes obtuse to use after you start to open a lot of windows and everything is boxed into corners and centering the window is frustrating. So most plan 9 users who actually write code use Sam. Another trick is windows in Rio are just text buffers so people open windows to use as scratch pads and then copy/paste between them and Sam. Then there's hold mode, the ultimate text editor. You hit escape while in a window and it turns blue indicating hold mode. While in hold mode rc or whatever is running will not receive anything you type into the window buffer via stdin as it's being held back in the buffer. So type as many lines of rc script or w/e, edit, then to run just hit escape and the text is processed. I do this all the time writing simple rc scripts. Then just echo 'blah...' >$home/bin/rc/bla and chmod +x bla when done.