Re: [9fans] Plan9 and Pine

[ori@eigenstate.org]

> Perhaps this is an opportunity for the Plan 9 community to think what it
> would mean to run in a phone form factor. From my experience with the
> different phone OSes, there's quite a bit of similarity (home screens,
> grids of "apps").

Fundamentally, there's nothing about the building blocks in plan 9
are set up to prevent this. You'd need to think hard about providing
a good interface to the touch screen, gestures, etc. Possibly an event
device that a windowing system could inject interesting events into as
it recognized gestures like pinch, scroll, etc. A soft keyboard. Stuff
like that. Deciding how to allow text selection and manipulation to work
in an ergonomic fashion when you can't even double click easily, let
alone chord the mouse.

And then the hard part: You'd need to patch every graphical program. For
many -- eg, rio, acme and sam -- I suspect that there's no saving them,
and phone capable alternatives will just have to be written.

So, a small amount of work on input, and then a ton of rewriting the
code that exists.