VNC is great for what it is, and I certainly wouldn’t object to seeing vncs upgraded, but it is not a replacement for drawterm. It does not expose local devices in a plan 9 friendly way. In addition to just using drawterm as a straightforward terminal, an iOS version would be a very good platform for playing around with exposing other capabilities that the device has to plan 9. I played around with this a little bit with the original port. VNC buys us none of this.

On Mar 25, 2020, at 04:21, Kim Lassila <kim.lassila@gmail.com> wrote:



On Mar 25, 2020, at 8:19 AM, Anthony Sorace <a@9srv.net> wrote:

With iOS getting first-class mouse pointer support, I’m looking at the iOS drawterm port again. Has anyone touched this since the old GSoC project bit rotted out?

Drawterm is quite slow at reading and writing pixels on the screen. I learned this when I started recording screen in Plan 9 (https://github.com/9d0/screencast). 

Instead of porting drawterm to different platforms I would like to see vncs improved to support the latest version of the Remote Framebuffer Protocol (RFC 6143). This would allow a standard VNC client to connect to a Plan 9 terminal, support screen resizing, local mouse cursor, and deliver all key strokes and mouse chords accurately. VNC is optimized to work over a large variety of different networks including high latency links and it will therefore offer a better user experience than drawterm, especially over wireless. 

Kim

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