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)
One interesting trick about only using pen and paper, is that your Handwriting becomes like a quick indicator to your state of mind.
If I'm taking notes and they come out like chicken scratch it means I'm usually too agitated and just rushing. Even just writing slower doesn't help. You basically have to actively relax yourself, breathe in/out, and collected yourself.
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
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!
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.
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), 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)
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.
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.
Because compatibility. All the existing text programs assume the physical tele-typewriter emulator. There have been many attempts to modernize the essential parts of the text console experience and do away with the inessential parts, but they always fail to catch on because people expect to be able to run programs like 'top' and 'ls -la' and 'pstree', which expect to format their output on a handy fixed width character grid. And you can't easily patch mouse selection into the existing system because there is too much seperation between the terminal and the content - the terminal is not aware of the intended text formatting, and the program is not aware of where you clicked. Fixing this would also require patching the world.
If you want to live in the future, you can't use programs written in the past. There are many fine GUI text editors: leafpad is your basic bare-bones notepad-alike, and for my money Kate is the best 'notepad++' mega-text-editor that's still light enough to start instantly.
Nano, the simple editor every one loves to rag on for being overly simple, does actually support cursor cut n paste. (Hold shift and move the cursor. Then cut or paste.)
set mouse
set nowrap
set softwrap
With those three lines in ~/.nanorc, it now allows you to click n drag the mouse, and may work over ssh, depending on your terminal support, and wraps lines without inserting actual breaks.
It effectively is Notepad, as far as I'm concerned.
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.
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.)
why do you think its a good idea to keep touching the mouse? it's not about emulating a teletype machine. it's about not picking up your (probably right) hand and moving it to the mouse constantly. this is something the teletypewriters of the past never had to deal with. I guess you don't yet have RSI?
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)
>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?
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.
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.
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.
Plan9 tools are great to use on thinkpads since they actually have 3 buttons. Most would find a dedicated mouse more appropriate however (the vertical one with 3 buttons and a separate wheel for instance).
Plan9 workflow is mouse oriented and it's fantastic. Its keyboard workflow or the lack of it is infuriating, for me, your typical linux/vim guy.
The linux mouse oriented workflow, or the lack of it, is equally infuriating for me now that I have used plan9(port), acme, editable dumb terminals, etc. So I hack it in my tools, however I can.
I would warn newcomers that experimenting with plan9 and its tools can create strong frustration :)
I have used p9p for years because I like the GUI (in different modern laptops, always without external mouse). Other people prefer huge IDEs, many people prefer vim or emacs, and I also known some extremely good programmers who just use notepad. And yes, I am perfectly happy with that.
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.
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.
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.
Honestly, if you hate reading about obscure OSs and seeing how people tweak their UIs... I'm not sure why you are bothering to look at Hacker News. It's... right there in the name; if you don't want to read stuff that's targeted to hackers, maybe read something else.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
You probably should: the Guidelines outright note that the site isn't targeting something like 60% of the population, by the above.
> 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.
Then maybe you really should. I'd much rather read about off-kilter operating systems and their fans that I would about yet another American centric political article or who got rich this week selling clicks to the highest bidder.
> 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?
If you'd replace Plan 9 with Linux, this exact sentence could have been uttered in an equivalent forum anytime between 15 and 25 years ago.
If people won't use and promote great but unpopular stuff, things are never going to change, and we'll be stuck with the same crap we have today forever.
What are your top three most interesting stories on the front page? I'll upvote them for you.
One of the things I love about HN is how austere and information-dense the front page is. There are only two stories in the top ten I'm remotely interested in, and I figured that out in about as many seconds.
This is the Hacker News forum. Hackers are computer experts and enthusiasts that are interested in exploring the boundaries of computer technology or programming.
> stories about tiled window managers and/or Arch Linux and/or God knows what else are always showing up on HN.
Tiling window managers are a great tool that I use every day to optimize my work productivity. I like reading how others use them too, so I can learn new stuff from them.
This is one of those things that makes me wonder about synchronicity - was literally just browsing the Netflix queue and saw a title related to Plan 9 from Outer Space and it had me wondering about how Plan 9 was doing. Next glance at HN and whammo, right at the top - someone else was thinking about Plan 9.
[+] [-] ggm|6 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] vadansky|6 years ago|reply
If I'm taking notes and they come out like chicken scratch it means I'm usually too agitated and just rushing. Even just writing slower doesn't help. You basically have to actively relax yourself, breathe in/out, and collected yourself.
[+] [-] dangom|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
> 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!
[+] [-] 0x445442|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dexen|6 years ago|reply
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/
[1] https://github.com/9fans/plan9port
[2] https://youtu.be/dP1xVpMPn8M
[+] [-] rcarmo|6 years ago|reply
* 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), 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)
[+] [-] kylek|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xixixao|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dTal|6 years ago|reply
If you want to live in the future, you can't use programs written in the past. There are many fine GUI text editors: leafpad is your basic bare-bones notepad-alike, and for my money Kate is the best 'notepad++' mega-text-editor that's still light enough to start instantly.
[+] [-] shakna|6 years ago|reply
It effectively is Notepad, as far as I'm concerned.
[+] [-] npmn2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dexen|6 years ago|reply
And yes, it uses mouse-based select/cut/copy/paste, with line- and block- level operations.
[+] [-] pjmlp|6 years ago|reply
Basically on those systems you can expose code as UI callable operations, select code and give it to them.
[+] [-] tyingq|6 years ago|reply
https://notepadqq.com/wp/
[+] [-] skykooler|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmead|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iteratorloopmap|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sjm|6 years ago|reply
Bit of a deal-breaker for me, personally.
[+] [-] beagle3|6 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] forgotpwd16|6 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] TomMasz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonathanwallace|6 years ago|reply
That could change in the near future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTU7iLuv6g4&feature=youtu.be
[+] [-] smorrow|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianai|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sprash|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ggm|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jeromenerf|6 years ago|reply
Plan9 workflow is mouse oriented and it's fantastic. Its keyboard workflow or the lack of it is infuriating, for me, your typical linux/vim guy. The linux mouse oriented workflow, or the lack of it, is equally infuriating for me now that I have used plan9(port), acme, editable dumb terminals, etc. So I hack it in my tools, however I can.
I would warn newcomers that experimenting with plan9 and its tools can create strong frustration :)
[+] [-] yiyus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ddtaylor|6 years ago|reply
> Error code: MOZILLA_PKIX_ERROR_SELF_SIGNED_CERT
It's available via this HTTPS mirror if needed: https://archive.is/bVfPc
[+] [-] mrtweetyhack|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nycticorax|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] devinus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abhayb|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yjftsjthsd-h|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kick|6 years ago|reply
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
You probably should: the Guidelines outright note that the site isn't targeting something like 60% of the population, by the above.
[+] [-] jacquesm|6 years ago|reply
Then maybe you really should. I'd much rather read about off-kilter operating systems and their fans that I would about yet another American centric political article or who got rich this week selling clicks to the highest bidder.
[+] [-] vikingcaffiene|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scbrg|6 years ago|reply
If you'd replace Plan 9 with Linux, this exact sentence could have been uttered in an equivalent forum anytime between 15 and 25 years ago.
If people won't use and promote great but unpopular stuff, things are never going to change, and we'll be stuck with the same crap we have today forever.
[+] [-] pjmlp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcims|6 years ago|reply
One of the things I love about HN is how austere and information-dense the front page is. There are only two stories in the top ten I'm remotely interested in, and I figured that out in about as many seconds.
[+] [-] fouc|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danans|6 years ago|reply
Tiling window managers are a great tool that I use every day to optimize my work productivity. I like reading how others use them too, so I can learn new stuff from them.
[+] [-] 9wzYQbTYsAIc|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] random314|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] facorreia|6 years ago|reply
(...)
Watch this introductory video: https://youtu.be/6m3GuoaxRNM"
I think I'll pass.
[+] [-] EdwardDiego|6 years ago|reply
...and I stopped reading right there. Different doesn't mean worse.