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View Full Version : 9fans unite!



MaxIBoy
November 19th, 2009, 09:16 AM
How many 9fans are there in here? I've been running Plan 9 in Qemu the past few days and I'm only getting more and more impressed with it; my initial bad impressions are surprisingly easy to work around.

Take the lack of a "cat -n" for example. That's just 11 lines of RC script:
http://mirtchovski.com/lanlp9/scripts/catn

And when you think of how one line of script spans ten thousand lines of C (http://catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/ten-thousand.html), this is starting to look like a feature, not a bug.


Even the clunky UI is easy to improve. It took about an hour to write a desktop layout for Plan 9, almost all of which was me learning the RC lanugage and reading man pages. If I had to do it again now it would take at most 20 minutes.


(This one is slightly stretched, I was maximizing a 1024*768 Qemu window on a 1280*800 display.
http://img39.imageshack.us/img39/4189/de91label.th.png (http://img39.imageshack.us/i/de91label.png/)


http://img194.imageshack.us/img194/8170/de92.th.png (http://img194.imageshack.us/i/de92.png/)



Introducing window decorations with close and hide buttons would be as simple as making each window an instance of rio with two subwindows, plus hacking together a few lines of Plan9 C (better than UNIX C) to provide the buttons. Contrast this with X, where the window decorator alone is probably a couple hundred lines...