From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] Re: someone thinking about trying plan 9 In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 08 Nov 2000 15:09:15 GMT." References: <100O5.83751$hk2.227630@news6-win.server.ntlworld.com> From: Theo Honohan Message-Id: Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 17:11:59 +0000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 2438ab6c-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 In message , cbbrowne@hex.net write s: > "david.bates2" writes: > > I was reading about plan 9 recently. To be frank, I'd never head of it unti > l > > a week or two ago... I suppose I was just writing to ask whether it was > > worth installing at this point in time. I don't doubt that it has some > > powerful ideas, but does it have any decent apps that run on it at the > > moment? An example would be apps for spreadsheets, databases, and text > > editing.... and of course compilers for various langauges. Also, I am a > > little unclear on the role of rio. Is it the window manager? Is it an > > essential part of the system or can it be replaced as with a linux window > > manager? > > You're missing a rather _crucial_ point; there is no such thing as a > "Linux window manager." That's not a very helpful answer! I wonder whether you might have missed the word "as" in the second last line... I think you could say that rio *is* analogous to an X window manager, in some ways. In the sense that the X window manager is intended to provide policy and the X server to provide mechanism, rio provides a particular "window system" implementation on top of the underlying raster graphics facility (/dev/draw). As such, it provides a set of window management facilities, while the draw device multiplexes the display among a number of "clients", to use the X terminology. You could certainly replace rio with an alternative window system, although it's probably the case that most of the interesting window systems you might want to develop in Plan 9 would present a similar interface. It's conceivable that if you want to have windows that differ substantially from "asynchronous layers of text" -- some kind of multimedia, maybe -- then they might be better handled by a different display management discipline. Just as you can run a "nested" instance of rio inside a window, you could run an instance of your new window system within a rio window, or vice versa. Knock yourself out!