From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: presotto@closedmind.org
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] Plan 9
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Date: Mon,  5 Nov 2001 10:48:50 -0500
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No, everyone has to have exactly the same size screen and
has to type the same characters simultaneously...

The essence of rob's statement is that if you do nothing
to change it, your default working environment includes the
same set of shared resources that everyone else has, i.e.,
sources in the same place, servers with the same names, etc.
However you can modify that to hell and gone to the point
that one would be hard pressed to figure out two people are
in the same world.  The intentions were:

1) create an environment that was as easy to collaborate
 in as we had when we all lived on a single machine
2) don't force every user to be a system administrator

The system itself is malleable enough that I can create
sandboxes for users on my systems in which they think they are on
totally separate boxes.

That said, the amount of configurability of the UI is much
smaller than X windows.  Having just spent 3 weeks trying to
make 3 Linux systems look sort of the same, I appreciate that
less can be better.  However, I was a minimalist to start with
and this certainly will grate on the people that like to remap
every key, command name, function, and window border.  If you
do, Plan 9 isn't for you.