[9fans] Bringing nile's menuless mode to Lola

[9fans] Bringing nile's menuless mode to Lola

[penny]

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I've written a patchset to bring the menuless mode from Antohy's Nile [1] to Lola. Start in menuless mode with -m, it can also be toggled in the 13 lola menu, the patches are available at

shithub.us/penny/lola/HEAD/info.html

This patch enables creating windows by right click and sweeping the desktop, in windows middle click always plumbs and right click always sends. When in Nomenu mode, Lola will apply Nile's scrolling behavior to all windows. That is, windows will always autoscroll if you are at the bottom of the output, but will not if you are scrolled up.

In addition, Lola offers a system menu on mouse chord 1->3 and I have added a Nomenu option to this menu to allow toggling Nomenu mode at runtime.
No special accommodations were made for tabification, however on certain themes(including simple.c, and the patched win95.c in that repo) you may right click the title bar to yoink a window for tabification and I have found this more than suitable.
Changes were made to accommodate lola's system menu, the hidden window menu on the desktop has been moved to mouse 2, and includes the Delete and Hide verbs as I think it makes sense to make them available. The "menuless" notion only really applies to the windows themselves, and the creation thereof.

While this patchset is functionality a complete port of Nile's menuless mode to lola, Nile was based on 4th edition which does not offer "look", and therefore that functionality is not currently exposed in menuless operation. I am considering options for integrating it with these patches, including offering a keyboard combination.

Questions comments jeering bug reports and suggestions welcome

- Penny, aka, "panini"

1 - https://web.archive.org/web/20251119033354/http://a.9srv.net/src/nile/index.html
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Re: [9fans] Bringing nile's menuless mode to Lola

[hiro]

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" in windows middle click always plumbs and right click always sends"

Isn't this the opposite of how it's done in ACME?

On Sunday, January 25, 2026, <penny@limitedideas.org> wrote:

> I've written a patchset to bring the menuless mode from Antohy's Nile [1]
> to Lola. Start in menuless mode with -m, it can also be toggled in the 13
> lola menu, the patches are available at
>
> shithub.us/penny/lola/HEAD/info.html
>
> This patch enables creating windows by right click and sweeping the
> desktop, in windows middle click always plumbs and right click always
> sends. When in Nomenu mode, Lola will apply Nile's scrolling behavior to
> all windows. That is, windows will always autoscroll if you are at the
> bottom of the output, but will not if you are scrolled up.
>
> In addition, Lola offers a system menu on mouse chord 1->3 and I have
> added a Nomenu option to this menu to allow toggling Nomenu mode at runtime.
> No special accommodations were made for tabification, however on certain
> themes(including simple.c, and the patched win95.c in that repo) you may
> right click the title bar to yoink a window for tabification and I have
> found this more than suitable.
> Changes were made to accommodate lola's system menu, the hidden window
> menu on the desktop has been moved to mouse 2, and includes the Delete and
> Hide verbs as I think it makes sense to make them available. The "menuless"
> notion only really applies to the windows themselves, and the creation
> thereof.
>
> While this patchset is functionality a complete port of Nile's menuless
> mode to lola, Nile was based on 4th edition which does not offer "look",
> and therefore that functionality is not currently exposed in menuless
> operation. I am considering options for integrating it with these patches,
> including offering a keyboard combination.
>
> Questions comments jeering bug reports and suggestions welcome
>
> - Penny, aka, "panini"
>
> 1 - https://web.archive.org/web/20251119033354/http://a.9srv.
> net/src/nile/index.html
> *9fans <https://9fans.topicbox.com/latest>* / 9fans / see discussions
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> <https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/members> + delivery options
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>

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[9fans] Re: Bringing nile's menuless mode to Lola

[penny]

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On Sunday, January 25, 2026, at 5:10 PM, hiro wrote:
> Isn't this the opposite of how it's done in ACME?
Yes, and in fact,  I did get the patch reversed! I'll change it to that way ha ha
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[9fans] Re: Bringing nile's menuless mode to Lola

[penny]

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The uh, corrected code has been committed to the repo
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[9fans] Re: Bringing nile's menuless mode to Lola

[penny]

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I've committed a modified version of nile's scrolling suggested by yvyvy on the 9fans discord, autoscrolling is now enabled by hitting "end" and disabled by all scrolling operations, rather than being based on the current scroll position. This improves compatibility with modern plan 9 software like git/log that takes advantage of the no scroll behavior, and I think proves to be an even more transparent way to manage the scroll state.
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Re: [9fans] Bringing nile's menuless mode to Lola

[hiro]

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On my keyboard theres a samscroll button. On some localizations its called
scroll-lock.

On Wednesday, January 28, 2026, <penny@limitedideas.org> wrote:

> I've committed a modified version of nile's scrolling suggested by yvyvy
> on the 9fans discord, autoscrolling is now enabled by hitting "end" and
> disabled by all scrolling operations, rather than being based on the
> current scroll position. This improves compatibility with modern plan 9
> software like git/log that takes advantage of the no scroll behavior, and I
> think proves to be an even more transparent way to manage the scroll state.
> *9fans <https://9fans.topicbox.com/latest>* / 9fans / see discussions
> <https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans> + participants
> <https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/members> + delivery options
> <https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription> Permalink
> <https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tcff5f5374fb94ee2-Mab48d3ef669a5452eca8ed81>
>

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Re: [9fans] Bringing nile's menuless mode to Lola

[penny]

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On Wednesday, January 28, 2026, at 4:29 AM, hiro wrote:
> On my keyboard theres a samscroll button. On some localizations its called scroll-lock. 
While the scroll lock key has become increasingly unavailable I would be interested in supporting it! But scroll lock acts a toggle switch with an indicator, which would need to be updated as you switch between windows. This is possible on PCs but I am unsure if there is any interface on Plan 9 that would make it possible.
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Re: [9fans] Bringing nile's menuless mode to Lola

[Stuart Morrow]

To me you're making the case against not bothering with scroll lock.
The Nile way is subjectively the better interface, but what really
convinced me of it is you'd get to delete a line from keyboard(6) (and
avoid future deliberations about whether to mention Fn-K on
ThinkPads).

In other words,
DON'T KEEP ROLLEN↓ ROLLEN↓ ROLLEN↓ ROLLEN↓
DON'T KEEP ROLLEN↓ ROLLEN↓ ROLLEN↓ ROLLEN↓

A lot of Plan 9 simplicity comes from just not having a thing in the
first place.  For example: drag and drop has never meant anything in
Plan 9, so a window manager also doesn't need to think about
cross-window drag and drop.

Or: with our push-to-talk popup menus, you never have to unstick a
menu because of a click in a different window.  I'd hate to see
someone solve touchscreens by making those menus sticky (and putting
them on something arbitrary like a two-finger tap).  (The rio menu
should really be pulled in from a screen edge like going to aeroplane
mode on a phone -- but then, does that translate well to other
programs?)

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Re: [9fans] Bringing nile's menuless mode to Lola

[penny]

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On Wednesday, January 28, 2026, at 2:30 PM, Stuart Morrow wrote:
>  To me you're making the case against not bothering with scroll lock.
I'm actually having some trouble being sure what you're suggesting, but if you mean you think I should support the scroll lock key without worrying the toggle- call me picky but it simply would really bother me that the key would toggle the global state of an indicator irrespective of the window's scroll state.
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Re: [9fans] Bringing nile's menuless mode to Lola

[Stuart Morrow]

My mistake.
/making the case against not bothering with scroll lock/ s/against/for/
or:
/making the case against not bothering with scroll lock/ /not/d

Basically: there's a dev for the PS/2 LEDs, but you can avoid using it
by avoiding scroll lock altogether.

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Re: [9fans] Bringing nile's menuless mode to Lola

[penny]

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On Wednesday, January 28, 2026, at 6:07 PM, Stuart Morrow wrote:
> making the case against
Yeah I agree, supporting scroll lock just doesn't bring anything meaningful to the table
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Re: [9fans] Bringing nile's menuless mode to Lola

[hiro]

suggestion: "making the case for scroll lock"

On Thu, Jan 29, 2026 at 2:03 AM Stuart Morrow <morrow.stuart@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> My mistake.
> /making the case against not bothering with scroll lock/ s/against/for/
> or:
> /making the case against not bothering with scroll lock/ /not/d
> 
> Basically: there's a dev for the PS/2 LEDs, but you can avoid using it
> by avoiding scroll lock altogether.

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