Re: [9fans] Plan9 and Pine

["Ethan Gardener" <eekee57@fastmail.fm>]

this would be easy with a stylus on a resistive touchscreen and a few well-placed physical buttons.

on a progressive^Winaccurate touchscreen with no buttons, what changes would be required? strictly speaking, none at all: i've used plan 9 over vnc from my tablet with various interfaces. it's not strictly necessary to modify any of the programs, but... well, selecting text is the hard part. if i remember right, i always used kurt's trick: place brackets and double-click one of them. (for large selections, it's good even on a desktop) the vnc viewers i used had decent trackpad emulation. i prefer double-tapping on a touchscreen/pad to double-clicking a mouse, it's much less damaging to my joints. i suppose some might find it triggers the drag emulation, but i usually disabled drag because touchscreens are too inaccurate for drag to be useful in plan 9. besides, i always found it much easier to deliver a solid double-tap than the fiddly nonsense necessary to start drag emulation.

which vnc viewers were good? it's been a while, but one of the best ones had a bar at the bottom of the screen with buttons for right-mouse and control -- plan 9 interpretes control-b3 as b2. the rmb button modified the next tap. it was simple but quite effective. it reminds me of drawterm-ios, which if i understood right, (i never used it,) had 3 big buttons on-screen but off the drawing area. i've used a vnc viewer with onscreen buttons, but they were drawn on top of the display, leaving too little area visible. besides, i don't really want both hands on the screen. buttons which modify the next tap allow more flexibility in the way you hold the device, including the option to not hold it at all.

i found that one open-source vnc viewer for android to be awful. it got better over the years, but not better enough unless miracles have happened in the last year.

does anyone know what changes p9p has for apple multitouch trackpads? i recall one old-timer liking them much more than chording.

for some, all this may be moot; sl likes to use ed on his phone. i forget his full argument, but part of it is that phones are hard to type on, and so were teletypes. ;) i think poor/slow network was another part; he uses ed or sam -d with ssh and drawterm -G over mobile internet. i struggle with those editors specifically, but from other stuff i can confirm that keyboard-only use can be as good as anything else on a tablet. i think i'd like samterm on mobile.

...or you could plug a mouse into your phone. ;) i actually installed a game which told me "this is no good without a real mouse."

hmm... mouse cumbersome... so when are we getting a phone with a built-in trackpoint? ;) i had an idea for a tablet with 2 trackpoints; you'd use them both to pinch.