Re: [9fans] interesting potential targets for plan 9 and/or inferno

["Jack Johnson" <knapjack@gmail.com>]

On 3/7/07, geoff@plan9.bell-labs.com <geoff@plan9.bell-labs.com> wrote:
> > How can you get under the hood if you can't figure out how to pop it up?
>
> Umm, read the documentation?

Hahaha, I remember having this problem when I was first introduced to
Plan 9, trying to figure out how to read the wiki in acme without
being able to read the wiki in acme.  I probably still have those
first survival printouts of how to configure the network so I could
get to the online documentation without rebooting between experiments.
 But as others have noted, that was my failing, or my blinders, not
seeing or knowing how to (best) access the internal documentation
immediately after installation.

I remember in college I stumbled around VMS thanks to the help system.
 It was self-teaching, in that you could start with HELP and it would
give you suggestions, and you could explore the whole command
documentation tree from that starting point.  Heck, I learned how to
FTP from the VMS help system.

My first introduction to UNIX, that was my first question, "How do I
find out what commands I can use?"

"You can use 'man', just type 'man commandname' and it will tell you
what it does.  Like this."

"What if I don't know the names of any of the commands?"

"Oh."

Inferno's wm/man is great in this respect, in that it's very
newbie-friendly, and the very first thing it does is explain itself.
Of course, lookman is handy, too (especially in acme), but maybe
either a simple wm/man-like port or just changing the default Glenda
window layout to better jumpstart the newbie down the internal
documentation path might help.

What are the first four things you wanted to do back when you did your
first installation?

Mine were something like:

1 - explore (8 1/2 then / rio now, private namespaces, etc.)
2 - try to do something I was used to doing (checking email, which involved)
3 - configure the network
4 - read the online documentation (where's the browser?)

-J