On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 8:45 AM, errno <errno@cox.net> wrote:
After a few months of reading and learning and actual hands-on
experience, I've found that rio and acme and mk and 8c ,etc., are
far less interesting than union directories, per-process namespaces,
9p and intrinsic, ubiquitous distributed computing - that's where I
personally think the action is at.
The I humbly submit that you may have Missed The Point.
The things errmo finds more interesting are indeed where there has been far more experimentation. Acme is great as a programmer's editor but I tend to think that it has reached an evolutionary dead end (how's that as flamebait?:-). Its model of type anywhere doesn't buy you much where the primary mode is reading (as opposed to writing or editing). Not everything requiring a UI fits comfortably in the acme/rio model. Designing a good UI is just very hard and the challenges there IMHO don't benefit much from plan9's strong points.
Well designed documents that use multiple fonts, graphical elements, white space, colors, pictures are far easier on one's eyes. It would be great if such pages can be viewed, and even better, created on plan9. HTML isn't just for browsers anymore! On the Mac there are some great apps for journal or blog writing etc that use the webkit (not everyone uses MS word or pages). In a way a good webkit can *vitalize* plan9. So more power to errno if he wants to do this!