my previous message was meant to include a small addition which I
omitted by accident and which turned out to be wrong anyway. here is
the rest of the picture.

I presume that there is no program to read the text on the graphical
9vx terminal (which would be required in order to "visualize" rio), so
instead i've made a small addition to the win program that runs inside
'acme' allowing all input and output to be tee-d (logged) to a
separate file somewhere in the plan9 tree. that file can then be then
tail-ed, catted or whatever is needed in order to provide the text of
the acme conversation to a third program.

the changes are rather rude, but i hope they help. here is how to
install them: copy the attached main.c to /acme/bin/source/win (inside
plan9). cd to that directory and run 'mk install' from within 9vx.
then copy the new acme.dump file attached in this email to your home
directory in 9vx (/usr/youruser, it has to be in a home directory
because / is not writeable in 9vx). edit this file. the last line
provides the application to start. the argument to win which we just
added with the new code tells it to dump the conversation to
/usr/andrey/test.txt. change this to point to a file in your home
directory inside 9vx. this is the file which will contain the entire
conversation and update it in real-time. i imagine that whatever
program reads text will be using that file as its source.

start 9vx and acme again inside via "acme -l /path/to/acme.dump" and
it should start in a single-column mode with the new 'win' program
copying its i/o to the file of your choosing.

i admin it's convoluted, but it was a nice exercise in trying to
understand the system from a completely different point of view.

hope it's useful.

andrey