[9fans] Questions

[9fans] Questions

[Markus]

>         My keyboard' arrows keys don't work. How I do for use the arrows keys?

i think, the arrow keys work, but not as you might expect:
keyboard(6) reads: 
	The view character (0x80), used by 8.5(1) and sam(1), causes
	windows to scroll forward. [...] The scroll character is
	generated by the VIEW key on the Gnot, the Alt Graph key on the
	SLC, and any of the three arrow keys <-, v, and -> on the other
	terminals

for anyhing else you're encouraged to use the mouse. :)

-markus

[9fans] questions

[Skip Tavakkolian]

Anybody working on 9P support for Java (i.e.  Java classes)?
How about tunneling of 9P through HTTP (somewhat perverse)?

[9fans] Questions

[Pete]

> Of course, you're free to redefine the keys in your own copy
> of the source!  Me, I'm looking for something to map those blasted
> Win 95 keys to.  Does Unicode have a hangman's noose character?
> Or a skull and crossbones?  I guess there's always the frowning
> face character...

Most of the keyboards at my current workplace have had their Win95 keys
removed, and, for some bizarre reason, sellotaped to anglepoise lamps.

A fate worse than... what? :)

pete

[9fans] Questions

[Scott]

David Hogan <dhog@lore.plan9.cs.su.oz.au> writes:
| Yes, but the suggestion which spawned this debate was that programs
| such as 8 1/2 which interpret the down arrow as the "view" key should
| interpret the arrow glyphs as control characters (after matching
| modifications to the console driver).  As Rob points out, this is a
| bad idea since it makes it impossible for a user to insert literal
| arrow glyphs. 

That's not entirely true, since you could always snarf one of those
reserved characters from a ½char window.

| Unicode defines certain characters which can be used as "control"
| characters.  Attempting to use others this way would be a mistake.

But given that the architecture of the console device is to just
return characters, not events, you have to abuse some characters
or other.  The "view" key is just the narrow end of the wedge.

Isn't it the case that there are OS reserved sections of the unicode 
space that could be used for this sort of thing?

(Linux puts Klingon script there... do we want to buck the trend?)

| I actually like the way that all three of the bottom row of arrow
| keys act as the view key; one doesn't need to be so precise. 

Hm.  I have a hard time hitting the wrong arrow.  Especially on a
keyboard with a t-bar configuration.

| Of course, you're free to redefine the keys in your own copy
| of the source! 

It's much more fun to have some sort of consensus, rather than
a bunch of disparate hacks.

P.S.  skull and crossbones is 2620.

[9fans] Questions

[David]

Elliott.Hughes@genedata.com wrote:
> rob@plan9.bell-labs.com wrote:
> > > In these internationalized days, shouldn't the arrows send unicode
> > > arrow chars?
> > Certainly not.  The arrow keys are control characters; the arrow
> > characters are printable glyphs.  This is like suggesting CR print
> > as a little down-and-to-the-left arrow.

> That's nonsense. The keys are what we choose to interpret them as. The
> "Return" key is a control key because that's the convention. The key
> with "W" painted on it is not because that's the convention.

Yes, but the suggestion which spawned this debate was that programs
such as 8 1/2 which interpret the down arrow as the "view" key should
interpret the arrow glyphs as control characters (after matching
modifications to the console driver).  As Rob points out, this is a
bad idea since it makes it impossible for a user to insert literal
arrow glyphs.  Imagine that the return key generated the "r" character,
and that 8 1/2 "knew" that that meant "return".  Then you'd look pretty
silly trying to run a command with "r" in it.

Unicode defines certain characters which can be used as "control"
characters.  Attempting to use others this way would be a mistake.

> As I see it, if the arrow keys aren't going to be used as distinct
> control keys then it makes perfect sense to have them output Unicode
> arrow characters. It might not be terribly useful, but we could use <-
> for assignment and -> to separate guards from commands, for example.
> Which is a lot more sensible than sending 16_80.

I actually like the way that all three of the bottom row of arrow
keys act as the view key; one doesn't need to be so precise.  Given
that "view" is a frequently used operation, this makes a lot of
sense (notice how shift, space, return, backspace, etc are wider
on most keyboards; that's because they are used more often).

Of course, you're free to redefine the keys in your own copy
of the source!  Me, I'm looking for something to map those blasted
Win 95 keys to.  Does Unicode have a hangman's noose character?
Or a skull and crossbones?  I guess there's always the frowning
face character...

[9fans] Questions

[elliott]

Steve_Kilbane@cegelecproj.co.uk wrote:
> There are two aspects to that. Firstly, much of Plan 9 hangs together
> because agreed conventions are obeyed (namespace construction, for
> example). Secondly, the mouse is used to move the pointer, which is
> just a convention, but it's one that's assumed at a pretty low level
> of many systems. Principle of Least Surprise.

you're bound to have surprises as long as you make mistakes. it seems to
me that the Plan 9ers consider there to be a difference between
"character keys" and "control keys", but they fail to make this
distinction in the software. just because Unicode has all those
hang-over bits of ASCII that fit many of their needs (Tab, Esc,
Backspace, Del, Return) they thought they could get away with their
dualism. the place where they fall over is the right-hand side of the
keyboard. they end up _feeling_ that the arrow keys are control, but
having left themselves no way to say this. but this _feeling_ makes them
incapable of using the keys to produce the Unicode arrow characters
(say).

but hey, even if they _did_ do that, where would they be with Insert or
Home or End?

[I remember seeing an IBM experiment where they projected a keyboard
onto the desk. Great for switching between Latin and Greek character
sets, but I can see a lot of uses for a comfortable dynamic keyboard. If
only one existed.]

> (Incidentally, this is also a reasonable argument for Del being a
> delete key; I much prefer the way libXg just accepts either backspace
> or delete as the delete key.)

The "delete key"? Confusion reigns ;-)

-- 
Elliott Hughes - GeneData AG, Postfach 254, CH-4016 Basel, Switzerland
mailto:elliott.hughes@genedata.com  http://users.ch.genedata.com/~enh/

[9fans] Questions

[Steve_Kilbane]

> That's nonsense. The keys are what we choose to interpret them as. The
> "Return" key is a control key because that's the convention. The key
> with "W" painted on it is not because that's the convention.

There are two aspects to that. Firstly, much of Plan 9 hangs together
because agreed conventions are obeyed (namespace construction, for
example). Secondly, the mouse is used to move the pointer, which is
just a convention, but it's one that's assumed at a pretty low level
of many systems. Principle of Least Surprise.

(Incidentally, this is also a reasonable argument for Del being a
delete key; I much prefer the way libXg just accepts either backspace
or delete as the delete key.)

[9fans] Questions

[elliott]

rob@plan9.bell-labs.com wrote:
> 
> > In these internationalized days, shouldn't the arrows send unicode
> > arrow chars?
> 
> Certainly not.  The arrow keys are control characters; the arrow
> characters are printable glyphs.  This is like suggesting CR print
> as a little down-and-to-the-left arrow.

That's nonsense. The keys are what we choose to interpret them as. The
"Return" key is a control key because that's the convention. The key
with "W" painted on it is not because that's the convention.

As I see it, if the arrow keys aren't going to be used as distinct
control keys then it makes perfect sense to have them output Unicode
arrow characters. It might not be terribly useful, but we could use <-
for assignment and -> to separate guards from commands, for example.
Which is a lot more sensible than sending 16_80.

-- 
Elliott Hughes - GeneData AG, Postfach 254, CH-4016 Basel, Switzerland
mailto:elliott.hughes@genedata.com  http://users.ch.genedata.com/~enh/

[9fans] Questions

[rob]

The up arrow is disinguished in Brazil from the others,
but it's not systematic across machines; the exact
behavior of the keyboard is machine-dependent,
although it shouldn't be.

> But just because a key is identified by a funny unicode
> glyph doesn't mean that the terminal emulator has to print that glyph
> whenever the key is struck; it just means that programs that care have
> a way to get an unambiguous symbol from the system.

But that's just it: how can a program tell an arrow key from a
legitimate arrow character when they driver doesn't disambiguate?
It's a bad idea to send Unicode values for control characters.
It's a terrible idea.

-rob

[9fans] Questions

[Scott]

rob@plan9.bell-labs.com writes:
| Certainly not.  The arrow keys are control characters; the arrow
| characters are printable glyphs.

In libXg, they send 0x80, 0x81, 0x82, 0x83.  What does Brazil do?  I
don't think that returning the same non-character (0x80) for all the
motion keys has worked out too well.

| This is like suggesting CR print
| as a little down-and-to-the-left arrow.

A little.  But just because a key is identified by a funny unicode
glyph doesn't mean that the terminal emulator has to print that glyph
whenever the key is struck; it just means that programs that care have
a way to get an unambiguous symbol from the system.

[9fans] Questions

[rob]

> In these internationalized days, shouldn't the arrows send unicode
> arrow chars?

Certainly not.  The arrow keys are control characters; the arrow
characters are printable glyphs.  This is like suggesting CR print
as a little down-and-to-the-left arrow.

-rob

[9fans] Questions

[Scott]

Markus Friedl <Markus.Friedl@informatik.uni-erlangen.de> writes:
| > My keyboard' arrows keys don't work. How I do for use the arrows keys?
| 
| i think, the arrow keys work, but not as you might expect:
| keyboard(6) reads: 
| 	The view character (0x80), used by 8.5(1) and sam(1), causes
| 	windows to scroll forward. [...] The scroll character is
| 	generated by the VIEW key on the Gnot, the Alt Graph key on the
| 	SLC, and any of the three arrow keys <-, v, and -> on the other
| 	terminals
| 
| for anyhing else you're encouraged to use the mouse. :)

Either that or alter the keyboard driver.  :-)

In these internationalized days, shouldn't the arrows send unicode
arrow chars?  shift-arrow could send the double width ones.  And
control-arrow can spit out some motion oriented character, such as
page-up, page-down, home, and end should do.

[9fans] Questions

[@ 1997-09-10 13:06 UTC (permalink / raw)]

        My keyboard' arrows keys don't work. How I do for use the arrows keys?

        Does Plan 9 support the following video board:
                
                Trident PCI mode 9680
        
        And support the following resolution with it:

                1024x768x8

        Thanks.

Franklin.

[9fans] Questions

[Steve]

> 1. How clear the display? Is there a similar command such "clear"  of Unix?

I don't have a system to hand to check this, but I seem to recall that
this should be a simple shell script to write the null string to the
body file of the 8.5 window (I could be getting confused with acme, though).

[9fans] Questions

[Steve]

> > 3. How abort a command? Is there a similar command such "^C"  of Unix=
?
> =

> because 8.5 handles
> this, there's no messing with stty.

which also means that there isn't a ^C equivalent until you run 8.5.

> > 4. Is there a command " FIND"?
> =

> a
> real find would be tricky, i suppose.

[ those without a strong stomach are advised to stop reading here ]

If you can compile the Plan 9 port of Perl, then the File::Find
libraries should work, and I seem to recall the Perl distribution
including a version of find(1) as part of the demos.

[9fans] Questions

[Ed]

Here are a couple of rc scripts that I wrote some years back to look
for files in the file system hierarchy .  They run slow but
do maintain the limited view of the file system one gets ignoring binds.
e.g. started in home directory, they will search rc/bin but not get lost
in /bin even though rc/bin is bound to /bin.

---------------------------------------

#!/bin/rc
#recursive decent of file system, with local directory stack and
#internal execution of this file.  ed wishart, nov '93 
if(~ $#* 0 1) {
	echo 'Usage: find directory file1 file2 ...'
	exit 1
}
dir = $1
shift
if(! test -d $dir) {
	echo 'First argumant must be a directory'
	exit 1
}
cd $dir
for(file in `{ls}) {
	if(~ $file $*) {
		echo  `{pwd}^/^$file
	}
	if(test -d $file) {
		dstack = `{echo `{pwd} $dstack}
#		echo 'dstack =' $dstack
		. find $file $*
		cd $dstack(1)
		dstack = $dstack(`{seq 2 $#dstack})
	}
}


--------------------------------------------------------

#!/bin/rc
#recursive traversal of file tree with environments managed by
#rc o its execution stack.  ed wishart nov '93 
if(~ $#* 0 1) {
	echo 'Usage: find directory file1 file2 ...'
	exit 1
}
dir = $1
shift
if(! test -d $dir) {
	echo 'First argumant must be a directory'
	exit 1
}
cd $dir
for(file in `{ls -p }) {
	if(~ $file $*) {
		echo  `{pwd}^/^$file
	}
	if(test -d $file) {
		find2 $file $*
	}
}

Note, the above assumes file in named find2

ed wishart

[9fans] Questions

[Nigel]

>> 4. Is there a command " FIND"?
>
>there's no find as standard, but i think forsyth wrote one. i seem to
>remember him calling it a hack to let him get an NNTP server running; a
>real find would be tricky, i suppose.
>
>du -a / | grep filename

[9fans] Questions

[elliott]

Franklin Robert Araujo Fran=E7a wrote:
> 1. How clear the display? Is there a similar command such "clear"  of
> Unix?

what display are you talking about? the console, or an 8.5 typescript? i
altered 8.5 to accept another command in a window's control file that
would select all the text in the window and delete it. i imagine 8.5's
author would say that you should throw that typescript away and open a
new one, but the PC i used to use Plan 9 on wasn't fast enough to make
that as comfortable as a "clear" utility. plus i was probably typing it
out of Unix habit.

you could clear the console too, using bitblt(), but i can't imagine you
using the console that much.

> 2. How Can I use the last command without type it again?

sweep the text with button 1, then choose "Send" from the button 2 menu.
edit the text first if you don't want to repeat it verbatim. or you
could try acme, where you sweep the text with button 2, and it's
executed as you let go the button.

> 3. How abort a command? Is there a similar command such "^C"  of Unix?

erm, ^C, i think. certainly on my version of 8.5 but i may have altered
that too. read the 8.5 man page: it'll tell you what the interrupt
character is [i just checked: it's Del by default]. because 8.5 handles
this, there's no messing with stty.

> 4. Is there a command " FIND"?

there's no find as standard, but i think forsyth wrote one. i seem to
remember him calling it a hack to let him get an NNTP server running; a
real find would be tricky, i suppose.

> 5. In the manual there is a command called "listen"  but in my system,
> this command not exist. How do I for use it?

are you sure there's a man page for listen in section 1? that's where
the commands are. i only remember listen(2) which is the part of the
programmatic interface to the network, and listen(8) which is the
daemon. i'd have thought it would be running already but if you really
want to run it, remember that you need to run aux/listen.

> 6. How do I for subscribe the fans list?

an email with "subscribe name email" in the body. or is it the other way
around (email name)?

-- =

Elliott Hughes - GeneData AG, Postfach 254, CH-4016 Basel, Switzerland
mailto:elliott.hughes@genedata.com  http://users.ch.genedata.com/~enh/

[9fans] Questions

[@ 1997-09-02 13:25 UTC (permalink / raw)]

        I have installed Plan 9 and I'm with the following questions:

1. How clear the display? Is there a similar command such "clear"  of Unix?

2. How Can I use the last command without type it again?

3. How abort a command? Is there a similar command such "^C"  of Unix?

4. Is there a command " FIND"?

5. In the manual there is a command called "listen"  but in my system, this
command not exist. How do I for use it?

6. How do I for subscribe the fans list? 

        Thanks.

Franklin.

[9fans] questions

[@ 1997-08-15 20:10 UTC (permalink / raw)]

Can I use Plan9 with a two-button mouse?

Can I increasing the video resolution?

Can I use Plan9 with a NE2000 at PCI bus?

There exists a File Server running at a standard PC with IDE?

Can a CPU Server exports files to a Terminal, that is, a CPU Server playing
the role a File Server?

Thanks.

Franklin.