From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <13426df10703081340u4a6fdbc8w6ac44c0ceb12c63b@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Thu,  8 Mar 2007 14:40:10 -0700
From: "ron minnich" <rminnich@gmail.com>
To: "Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs" <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Subject: Re: [9fans] Plan9 for a newbie
In-Reply-To: <45F072F9.10903@watford53.freeserve.co.uk>
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who needs command history?

grep something /dev/text

Also, I saw something in X11 lately. It was a desktop with a bunch of
xterms. When you resized one xterm, all the others resized so they all
remained tiled.

Plan 9 has had this for many years. Startup acme. Put win in the top
tagline. middle-click 6 or 7 tiimes. Not only do you get the same
thing, but you can trivially edit and do things in each window.

Try acme mail. Not perfect, but man it's faster than thunderbird. And
look at how it handles attachments. Very cool.

Start up a rio term window. Note that it is NOT a teletype attached to
a window, as in X11. After all, xterms have a baud rate. Just mouse
up, and note you can edit stuff.

Suppose you have a bunch of junk in a window, and you don't want to
see it, but you want the rest. On Unix, you type 'clear' and start
again. In the rio term window, just select a bunch of text, and delete
it.

Learn chords, like left-button-select, then middle. Then left, and
right. Very handy.

Run rio in a term window.

9fs sources. cd /n/sources. Have fun.

Run abaco. Note that you can tile web pages horizontally and
vertically. And you can see all the URLs ...

See how much code it takes to write a web browser in plan 9 -- look at
abaco source.

note there is no 'ftp' command. Who the heck needs ftp? Just run ftpfs. Done.

tarfs.

There's just so much stuff there. Check out acid -- see how it works.
See how it's built. Then wonder "why isn't every debugger built this
way".

man plumber.

The list is pretty endless. It just shows that with the right starting
point, you can do so much better than linux or x11 or all the stuff we
take for granted. I get really angry sometimes, using Linux. In fact I
just broke the U key on this laptop 2 days ago -- typed just a little
too hard and off it went. Now there's just a funny little blue thing
where U used to be.

thanks

ron