Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Brian L. Stuart]

On Wed, 6/20/18, Ethan A. Gardener <eekee57@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> but on the back burner is a
> Forth-based project; a sort of operating system where the
> primary interface to all tasks is a Forth interpreter. So
> far, I've written the basics of a text editor. It's
> *very* little code!

I love seeing this idea coming back around.  Way back
in college, one of my senior projects was a little OS on
the PDP-11 that was done exactly this way.  The app
language and the command language were a Forth
implementation I had done out of curiosity in my freshman
year.  About a year and half ago, I got it running again,
first in simh, then on a little LSI-11 in those cute little
BA11-VA boxes.  It was wild seeing that running again
after over 30 years, and I found and fixed a concurrency
bug. :)  One of my students did (mostly just started on)
a project his past term that's gotten me to thinking a
little about reimplementing the whole thing on a Pi.

BLS

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Tyga]

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That's very neat !

You might want to consider using a derivative of that PDP-11 work in a IoT
(Internet of Things) context.

IoT devices really need a better programming environment than that provided
by Arduino development tools.

On 28 June 2018 at 02:20, Brian L. Stuart <blstuart@bellsouth.net> wrote:

> On Wed, 6/20/18, Ethan A. Gardener <eekee57@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> > but on the back burner is a
> > Forth-based project; a sort of operating system where the
> > primary interface to all tasks is a Forth interpreter. So
> > far, I've written the basics of a text editor. It's
> > *very* little code!
>
> I love seeing this idea coming back around.  Way back
> in college, one of my senior projects was a little OS on
> the PDP-11 that was done exactly this way.  The app
> language and the command language were a Forth
> implementation I had done out of curiosity in my freshman
> year.  About a year and half ago, I got it running again,
> first in simh, then on a little LSI-11 in those cute little
> BA11-VA boxes.  It was wild seeing that running again
> after over 30 years, and I found and fixed a concurrency
> bug. :)  One of my students did (mostly just started on)
> a project his past term that's gotten me to thinking a
> little about reimplementing the whole thing on a Pi.
>
> BLS
>
>

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Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Mart Zirnask]

Regarding Forth systems, this might also be of interest:
http://cosy.com

"CoSy is the evolute of a life lived in noteComputing environments
built in Ken Iverson's APL and Arthur Whitney's K now built Ron
Aaron's open to the chip Reva Forth"

Mart



On 28/06/2018, Tyga <cyberfonic@gmail.com> wrote:
> That's very neat !
>
> You might want to consider using a derivative of that PDP-11 work in a IoT
> (Internet of Things) context.
>
> IoT devices really need a better programming environment than that provided
> by Arduino development tools.
>
> On 28 June 2018 at 02:20, Brian L. Stuart <blstuart@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 6/20/18, Ethan A. Gardener <eekee57@fastmail.fm> wrote:
>> > but on the back burner is a
>> > Forth-based project; a sort of operating system where the
>> > primary interface to all tasks is a Forth interpreter. So
>> > far, I've written the basics of a text editor. It's
>> > *very* little code!
>>
>> I love seeing this idea coming back around.  Way back
>> in college, one of my senior projects was a little OS on
>> the PDP-11 that was done exactly this way.  The app
>> language and the command language were a Forth
>> implementation I had done out of curiosity in my freshman
>> year.  About a year and half ago, I got it running again,
>> first in simh, then on a little LSI-11 in those cute little
>> BA11-VA boxes.  It was wild seeing that running again
>> after over 30 years, and I found and fixed a concurrency
>> bug. :)  One of my students did (mostly just started on)
>> a project his past term that's gotten me to thinking a
>> little about reimplementing the whole thing on a Pi.
>>
>> BLS
>>
>>
>

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Bakul Shah]

On Jun 28, 2018, at 12:22 AM, Mart Zirnask <martzirnask@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Regarding Forth systems, this might also be of interest:
> http://cosy.com

People may find articles on k, joy etc. on Stevan Apter's
website to be interesting:
  http://nsl.com/
In particular Stevan Apter's conversation with Manfred von
Thun (designer of the Joy language):
  http://archive.vector.org.uk/art10000350

Excerpt:
  The language Joy is a purely functional programming language.
  Whereas all other functional programming languages are based
  on the application of functions to arguments, Joy is based on
  the composition of functions.
    ...
  The semantics of this notation is summed up by: "The
  concatenation of appropriate programs denotes the composition
  of the functions which the programs denote".

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Brian L. Stuart]

On Fri, 6/15/18, Mark van Atten <vanattenmark@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 15, 2018 at 6:44 PM, Brian L. Stuart <blstuart@bellsouth.net> wrote:
> > Can't say for LInux, but I run it all the time under 64-bit FreeBSD.
>
> As of 11.0, FreeBSD has its own fdclose() with conflicting types.
> https://github.com/0intro/vx32/issues/3
>
> Did you patch it, or are you running an earlier FreeBSD?

As I recall, I'm still running a binary I built on FreeBSD 10.  It
looks like it's dated Jun 2016.  So I hadn't noticed the conflict.

BLS

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Brian L. Stuart]

On Fri, 6/15/18, Lucio De Re <lucio.dere@gmail.com> wrote:
> Great news. I've upgraded my Linux Mint to 64-buit ad I've been
> reluctant to experiment with 9vx, which I really like a lot. Can you
> confirm thatit runs OK under 64-bit Linux? Do I need to add any
> special bits, different from p9p, to get it to compile?

Can't say for LInux, but I run it all the time under 64-bit FreeBSD.

BLS

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Mark van Atten]

On Fri, Jun 15, 2018 at 6:44 PM, Brian L. Stuart <blstuart@bellsouth.net> wrote:
> Can't say for LInux, but I run it all the time under 64-bit FreeBSD.

As of 11.0, FreeBSD has its own fdclose() with conflicting types.
https://github.com/0intro/vx32/issues/3

Did you patch it, or are you running an earlier FreeBSD?

Mark.

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[cinap_lenrek]

> That said, I would switch to 9front + vmx immediately. (I even
> conceptualized an awk-based "suite" for audio montage for Acme, using
> the "everything is a file" paradigm".)
>
> Unfortunately my Intel 2200bg wifi card doesn't seem to work in
> 9front. Has somebody maybe finished rsc's driver in the meanwhile?

well, thats mutually exclusive condition. to run vmx you need a modern
machine with ept/vmm support. which usually wont have such an old
wifi card.

get an ivy bidge thinkpad x230 with intel wifi link card.

		case 0x0084:	/* WiFi Link 1000 */
		case 0x4229:	/* WiFi Link 4965 */
		case 0x4230:	/* WiFi Link 4965 */
		case 0x4232:	/* Wifi Link 5100 */
		case 0x4236:	/* WiFi Link 5300 AGN */
		case 0x4237:	/* Wifi Link 5100 AGN */
		case 0x4239:	/* Centrino Advanced-N 6200 */
		case 0x423d:	/* Wifi Link 5150 */
		case 0x423b:	/* PRO/Wireless 5350 AGN */
		case 0x0082:	/* Centrino Advanced-N 6205 */
		case 0x0085:	/* Centrino Advanced-N 6205 */
		case 0x422b:	/* Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 variant 1 */
		case 0x4238:	/* Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 variant 2 */
		case 0x08ae:	/* Centrino Wireless-N 100 */
		case 0x0083:	/* Centrino Wireless-N 1000 */
		case 0x0887:	/* Centrino Wireless-N 2230 */
		case 0x0888:	/* Centrino Wireless-N 2230 */
		case 0x0090:	/* Centrino Advanced-N 6030 */
		case 0x0091:	/* Centrino Advanced-N 6030 */
		case 0x088e:	/* Centrino Advanced-N 6235 */
		case 0x088f:	/* Centrino Advanced-N 6235 */

--
cinap

[9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[刘宇宝]

Yesterday night I finished the sixth article of my Plan 9 adventure series at Zhihu, a Chinese Quora like site, https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/c_185117725

I feel many things are interesting and special, such as Rio(simple and beautiful, love it), Acme(so easy to extend), 9p(simple and clean), rc(right shell), but I'm still not very used to heavy use of mouse.

I find a bunch of game emulators, instruction simulators, fs servers, incomplete POSIX environment, all seem very old, this makes me wondering whether anybody still seriously uses(or used?) Plan 9 for serious work, what software they frequently use, what software is most lack of.

For my daily work and hobby, I use macOS for Desktop and Linux for Server,  most frequently used softwares include:

* iTerm2+Vim+Spacemacs:  	I can use Acme + rc instead.
* SSH: 		Plan9 has an old SSH client.
* Perl, Python, NodeJS: Probably I can't get latest versions and enough support for their C extensions, it's basically fine, I can edit it with Acme and run on Linux.
* VirtualBox: 	I haven't played vmx.
* Firefox: 		I heard there is an old version running on X.  Abaco and Mothra are not enough to render correctly most (crappy) web pages.
* Apple Mail: 	haven't played upasfs, I guess this is enough.
* Wechat: 	certainly not exist on Plan 9, it's fine,  it doesn't exist on Linux too.
* Video Player:  don't know any on Plan 9.

So far, seems the most lacking software for me is a good enough Web browser.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I don't care whether Plan 9 will win the market, I'm just curious whether Plan 9 can still be used seriously.

Thanks,
Yubao Liu

[9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[刘宇宝]

[sorry to cross post to 9front, hope somebody there can double check]

Uh, is the mailing list down? I can't find any new emails after 5/14 at https://marc.info/?l=9fans,  
also can't connect to http://mail.9fans.net/.

> On Jun 11, 2018, at 2:14 PM, ??? <liuyubao at yingmi.cn> wrote:
> 
> Yesterday night I finished the sixth article of my Plan 9 adventure series at Zhihu, a Chinese Quora like site, https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/c_185117725
> 
> I feel many things are interesting and special, such as Rio(simple and beautiful, love it), Acme(so easy to extend), 9p(simple and clean), rc(right shell), but I'm still not very used to heavy use of mouse.
> 
> I find a bunch of game emulators, instruction simulators, fs servers, incomplete POSIX environment, all seem very old, this makes me wondering whether anybody still seriously uses(or used?) Plan 9 for serious work, what software they frequently use, what software is most lack of.
> 
> For my daily work and hobby, I use macOS for Desktop and Linux for Server,  most frequently used softwares include:
> 
> * iTerm2+Vim+Spacemacs:  	I can use Acme + rc instead.
> * SSH: 		Plan9 has an old SSH client.
> * Perl, Python, NodeJS: Probably I can't get latest versions and enough support for their C extensions, it's basically fine, I can edit it with Acme and run on Linux.
> * VirtualBox: 	I haven't played vmx.
> * Firefox: 		I heard there is an old version running on X.  Abaco and Mothra are not enough to render correctly most (crappy) web pages.
> * Apple Mail: 	haven't played upasfs, I guess this is enough.
> * Wechat: 	certainly not exist on Plan 9, it's fine,  it doesn't exist on Linux too.
> * Video Player:  don't know any on Plan 9.
> 
> So far, seems the most lacking software for me is a good enough Web browser.
> 
> Oh, don't get me wrong, I don't care whether Plan 9 will win the market, I'm just curious whether Plan 9 can still be used seriously.
> 
> Thanks,
> Yubao Liu
> 
> 
> 

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[N. S. Montanaro]

I think a lot of people discover Plan 9 and want it to be something it isn’t, rather than stumble upon it out of necessity. As the FQA says, “Plan 9 is not for you."

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[刘宇宝]

Compared to "not for you", "don't care",  "intend to not be successful", I like more the topic of cat-v irc channel on freenode set by aiju:  "fun fact: you can use multiple operating systems at the same time".

Certainly Plan 9 can't replace Linux/macOS/BSD/Windows, I'm still curious its upper bound for a sensible daily usage,  and the best practice from you happy experienced Plan 9 users.

I checked mail headers in this mailing list, seems all use Apple Mail, iPhone Mail, WebMail with AJAX, Gmail(a lot), ProtonMail,  these emails went through Postfix and Exim servers, probably on Linux.

In great harmony, we use kinds of operating system and kinds of software on them.

Regards,
Yubao Liu

> On Jun 14, 2018, at 10:53 AM, N. S. Montanaro <nsm@airmail.cc> wrote:
> 
> I think a lot of people discover Plan 9 and want it to be something it isn’t, rather than stumble upon it out of necessity. As the FQA says, “Plan 9 is not for you."

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Lucio De Re]

My most current frustration (a bit off topic) is Skype's keystroke
echo latency, whatever the cause. I can't cope with it, yet I have to
use it for employment reasons.

It reminds me that upas with acme Mail is immeasurably faster at
reading and reacting to mail than the bloat I need to use as a mailer:
Thunderbird; and less buggy. Sadly, I could choose my mailer, in this
case, but mailman queue moderation in Plan 9 is just not viable unless
I code my own tool chest for that and I just have too many higher
priority tasks to do that. It nags me, just not enough.

So, why is my main workstation a Plan 9 one?

 I think the most significant reason may well be that a
top-of-the-line Apple laptop is way beyond my means; I rage against
Apple, yet I have seen too many people I respect switch to Apple and
even though I believe the reason is fashion rather than practicality,
I cannot stop the suspicion that the only barrier to me capitulating
too is my lack of funds.

So, that bit aside, a native Plan 9 environment is what I enjoy
developing small prototype tools (software tools), which is what I
mostly do for a living, in Go. Big screen, fast reaction on old
hardware, seamless compilations and testing and, best of all, platform
independence (also "it keeps me honest"). And Go has so many native
libraries, I can play with PostgreSQL or OpenLDAP and many other
foreign services without touching Linux for hours on end (no open
Windows, here, with really, really rare exceptions).

There is a middling list of improvements I would like, some needing
hard work (Go's Shiny), some in  the middle (proper SSH functionality,
native to Plan 9 - I haven't had a chance to mess with Go's options),
and some trivial (vmx is a recent discovery, I haven't had the time to
set up a working, integrated instance of 9front, upas or similar is
the pressing one).

But it all helps me keep my sanity and that makes up for a lot of shortcomings.

Lucio.

On 6/14/18, 刘宇宝 <liuyubao@yingmi.cn> wrote:
> Compared to "not for you", "don't care",  "intend to not be successful", I
> like more the topic of cat-v irc channel on freenode set by aiju:  "fun
> fact: you can use multiple operating systems at the same time".
>
> Certainly Plan 9 can't replace Linux/macOS/BSD/Windows, I'm still curious
> its upper bound for a sensible daily usage,  and the best practice from you
> happy experienced Plan 9 users.
>
> I checked mail headers in this mailing list, seems all use Apple Mail,
> iPhone Mail, WebMail with AJAX, Gmail(a lot), ProtonMail,  these emails went
> through Postfix and Exim servers, probably on Linux.
>
> In great harmony, we use kinds of operating system and kinds of software on
> them.
>
> Regards,
> Yubao Liu
>
>> On Jun 14, 2018, at 10:53 AM, N. S. Montanaro <nsm@airmail.cc> wrote:
>>
>> I think a lot of people discover Plan 9 and want it to be something it
>> isn’t, rather than stumble upon it out of necessity. As the FQA says,
>> “Plan 9 is not for you."
>
>


-- 
Lucio De Re
2 Piet Retief St
Kestell (Eastern Free State)
9860 South Africa

Ph.: +27 58 653 1433
Cell: +27 83 251 5824
FAX: +27 58 653 1435

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[hiro]

> There is a middling list of improvements I would like, some needing
> hard work (Go's Shiny),
what exactly do you mean?

> some in  the middle (proper SSH functionality,
> native to Plan 9 - I haven't had a chance to mess with Go's options)
already done by cinap.
easy, native, and without any broken go stuff.

> and some trivial (vmx is a recent discovery, I haven't had the time to
> set up a working, integrated instance of 9front, upas or similar is
> the pressing one).
>
> But it all helps me keep my sanity and that makes up for a lot of
> shortcomings.

Have fun! :)

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[刘宇宝]

> On Jun 15, 2018, at 5:12 AM, hiro <23hiro@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> There is a middling list of improvements I would like, some needing
>> hard work (Go's Shiny),
> what exactly do you mean?

It's said Go doesn't official support Plan 9 any more,  maybe I'm wrong...

> 
>> some in  the middle (proper SSH functionality,
>> native to Plan 9 - I haven't had a chance to mess with Go's options)
> already done by cinap.
> easy, native, and without any broken go stuff.

Do you mean /sys/src/cmd/ssh.c ? If not, where can I obtain it?

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[N. S. Montanaro]

As of February Go supports Plan 9, according to David du Colombier. I was doing some projects with Go and shot him an email around that time.

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[hiro]

> Do you mean /sys/src/cmd/ssh.c ? If not, where can I obtain it?
The path is correct. It's part of 9front.

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Ole-Hjalmar Kristensen]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1948 bytes --]

I cannot really say I am using Plan9 for anything serious, although I have
both Plan9 and 9Front running on a couple of old laptops. I keep them
around mainly to see if I can grok the ideas and maybe steal some of them
:-)

But I run the Plan9port tools on both Linux and Solaris, and occasionally
Inferno on Windows, when I want a sane environment there. Acme is my main
editor these days. The 'everything is text' approach works very well when
developing on multiple paltforms (Solaris, Linux, BSD, Windows). In Acme,
the left button combined with the plumber  is really usefull when jumping
from a debug printout in the log to the source code. I run Vac/Venti on
Linux as my backup system both at home and at work.

If I ever get some spare time, I intend to set up a cron job to replicate
the contents between the two Venti servers.



On Thu, Jun 14, 2018 at 5:53 AM, 刘宇宝 <liuyubao@yingmi.cn> wrote:

> Compared to "not for you", "don't care",  "intend to not be successful", I
> like more the topic of cat-v irc channel on freenode set by aiju:  "fun
> fact: you can use multiple operating systems at the same time".
>
> Certainly Plan 9 can't replace Linux/macOS/BSD/Windows, I'm still curious
> its upper bound for a sensible daily usage,  and the best practice from you
> happy experienced Plan 9 users.
>
> I checked mail headers in this mailing list, seems all use Apple Mail,
> iPhone Mail, WebMail with AJAX, Gmail(a lot), ProtonMail,  these emails
> went through Postfix and Exim servers, probably on Linux.
>
> In great harmony, we use kinds of operating system and kinds of software
> on them.
>
> Regards,
> Yubao Liu
>
> > On Jun 14, 2018, at 10:53 AM, N. S. Montanaro <nsm@airmail.cc> wrote:
> >
> > I think a lot of people discover Plan 9 and want it to be something it
> isn’t, rather than stumble upon it out of necessity. As the FQA says, “Plan
> 9 is not for you."
>
>

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Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Jerome Ibanes]

I've been using it with Klong ( http://t3x.org/klong/index.html )
lately which supports plan9 natively.

On Sat, Jun 16, 2018 at 6:39 AM, Ole-Hjalmar Kristensen
<ole.hjalmar.kristensen@gmail.com> wrote:
> I cannot really say I am using Plan9 for anything serious, although I have
> both Plan9 and 9Front running on a couple of old laptops. I keep them around
> mainly to see if I can grok the ideas and maybe steal some of them :-)
>
> But I run the Plan9port tools on both Linux and Solaris, and occasionally
> Inferno on Windows, when I want a sane environment there. Acme is my main
> editor these days. The 'everything is text' approach works very well when
> developing on multiple paltforms (Solaris, Linux, BSD, Windows). In Acme,
> the left button combined with the plumber  is really usefull when jumping
> from a debug printout in the log to the source code. I run Vac/Venti on
> Linux as my backup system both at home and at work.
>
> If I ever get some spare time, I intend to set up a cron job to replicate
> the contents between the two Venti servers.
>
>
>
> On Thu, Jun 14, 2018 at 5:53 AM, 刘宇宝 <liuyubao@yingmi.cn> wrote:
>>
>> Compared to "not for you", "don't care",  "intend to not be successful", I
>> like more the topic of cat-v irc channel on freenode set by aiju:  "fun
>> fact: you can use multiple operating systems at the same time".
>>
>> Certainly Plan 9 can't replace Linux/macOS/BSD/Windows, I'm still curious
>> its upper bound for a sensible daily usage,  and the best practice from you
>> happy experienced Plan 9 users.
>>
>> I checked mail headers in this mailing list, seems all use Apple Mail,
>> iPhone Mail, WebMail with AJAX, Gmail(a lot), ProtonMail,  these emails went
>> through Postfix and Exim servers, probably on Linux.
>>
>> In great harmony, we use kinds of operating system and kinds of software
>> on them.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Yubao Liu
>>
>> > On Jun 14, 2018, at 10:53 AM, N. S. Montanaro <nsm@airmail.cc> wrote:
>> >
>> > I think a lot of people discover Plan 9 and want it to be something it
>> > isn’t, rather than stumble upon it out of necessity. As the FQA says, “Plan
>> > 9 is not for you."
>>
>

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Rui Carmo]

I’m late to the thread, but this seems like a good point to step in.

I’m using plan9 on a quad-core Raspberry Pi as a sort of universal terminal to manage some of my home machines, and recently deleted the 9front VM I had on my home KVM server because even though the programming model and Go support were nice, most of my day-to-day work is on cloud solutions and there was no easy way to make those co-exist with Plan9 usage.

There were a few discussions in this thread around dev stacks, browsers, etc., and my $0.02 on that is that I could probably work in Plan9 on a daily basis _if_ it had a usable (i.e., all the warts including JavaScript and fonts) web browser, but that the lack of alignment (intended or otherwise) with Linux tools and app stacks (SSH, Node, Python, Java) would make it very painful.

Running a remote browser (which is what I do often in that Pi) sort of works, but you never get the full benefits you’d get with a native process. And lack of access to modern app stacks renders the platform unattractive for mainstream development work.

But what killed it for me was the need for chording (mouse or keys). Using a modern trackpad on a MacBook or Surface device is a quantum leap beyond using a mouse for general use, and the lack of a modernised Rio with enough thoughtful design to overcome the differences in philosophy is the first barrier to continued usage.

Acme is something I miss on occasion, but modern GUI editors compensate in other ways (at the expense of resource usage, etc., but with a massive boost in productivity for me). Also, I’m typing this on an iMac 5K with nearly unmatched font rendering and legibility (the only thing that comes close is the Surface Pro alongside it). Visuals matter a great deal.

There is an unmatchable degree of purity in Plan9, but (even though the diehards will stick their ground and claim it’s perfect to the exclusion of other modern comforts) to coexist successfully it has to provide more affordances.

Kind Regards,

R.

> On 14 Jun 2018, at 04:53, 刘宇宝 <liuyubao@yingmi.cn> wrote:
> 
> Compared to "not for you", "don't care",  "intend to not be successful", I like more the topic of cat-v irc channel on freenode set by aiju:  "fun fact: you can use multiple operating systems at the same time".
> 
> Certainly Plan 9 can't replace Linux/macOS/BSD/Windows, I'm still curious its upper bound for a sensible daily usage,  and the best practice from you happy experienced Plan 9 users.
> 
> I checked mail headers in this mailing list, seems all use Apple Mail, iPhone Mail, WebMail with AJAX, Gmail(a lot), ProtonMail,  these emails went through Postfix and Exim servers, probably on Linux.
> 
> In great harmony, we use kinds of operating system and kinds of software on them.
> 
> Regards,
> Yubao Liu
> 
>> On Jun 14, 2018, at 10:53 AM, N. S. Montanaro <nsm@airmail.cc> wrote:
>> 
>> I think a lot of people discover Plan 9 and want it to be something it isn’t, rather than stumble upon it out of necessity. As the FQA says, “Plan 9 is not for you."
> 

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[dexen deVries]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 4122 bytes --]

i'm using plan9port (thanks, rsc) on linux for some 8 years now, for all
coding - mostly low-brow web dev
primarily Acme as IDE, Rc and awk for scripting the necessary tooling

back when i was stuck at a corpo and had to use Windows on workstation, i
installed
p9p on one of build servers and ran Acme over LAN, through Xming
there was no noticeable latency; it felt snappier than the corpo blessed
IDE on windows

my typical setup is: slackware linux, p9p, Acme maximized on the right
screen.

a few years ago i've coded a minimalist IRC client for Acme, was
surprisingly comfy, but never followed it up
another small use case was simplistic HTTP server for game map files coded
in Rc;
just enough to handle HTTP GET with Range header. was maybe 50 lines of
shell.


On Thu, Jun 21, 2018 at 11:06 AM, Rui Carmo <rui.carmo@gmail.com> wrote:

> I’m late to the thread, but this seems like a good point to step in.
>
> I’m using plan9 on a quad-core Raspberry Pi as a sort of universal
> terminal to manage some of my home machines, and recently deleted the
> 9front VM I had on my home KVM server because even though the programming
> model and Go support were nice, most of my day-to-day work is on cloud
> solutions and there was no easy way to make those co-exist with Plan9 usage.
>
> There were a few discussions in this thread around dev stacks, browsers,
> etc., and my $0.02 on that is that I could probably work in Plan9 on a
> daily basis _if_ it had a usable (i.e., all the warts including JavaScript
> and fonts) web browser, but that the lack of alignment (intended or
> otherwise) with Linux tools and app stacks (SSH, Node, Python, Java) would
> make it very painful.
>
> Running a remote browser (which is what I do often in that Pi) sort of
> works, but you never get the full benefits you’d get with a native process.
> And lack of access to modern app stacks renders the platform unattractive
> for mainstream development work.
>
> But what killed it for me was the need for chording (mouse or keys). Using
> a modern trackpad on a MacBook or Surface device is a quantum leap beyond
> using a mouse for general use, and the lack of a modernised Rio with enough
> thoughtful design to overcome the differences in philosophy is the first
> barrier to continued usage.
>
> Acme is something I miss on occasion, but modern GUI editors compensate in
> other ways (at the expense of resource usage, etc., but with a massive
> boost in productivity for me). Also, I’m typing this on an iMac 5K with
> nearly unmatched font rendering and legibility (the only thing that comes
> close is the Surface Pro alongside it). Visuals matter a great deal.
>
> There is an unmatchable degree of purity in Plan9, but (even though the
> diehards will stick their ground and claim it’s perfect to the exclusion of
> other modern comforts) to coexist successfully it has to provide more
> affordances.
>
> Kind Regards,
>
> R.
>
> > On 14 Jun 2018, at 04:53, 刘宇宝 <liuyubao@yingmi.cn> wrote:
> >
> > Compared to "not for you", "don't care",  "intend to not be successful",
> I like more the topic of cat-v irc channel on freenode set by aiju:  "fun
> fact: you can use multiple operating systems at the same time".
> >
> > Certainly Plan 9 can't replace Linux/macOS/BSD/Windows, I'm still
> curious its upper bound for a sensible daily usage,  and the best practice
> from you happy experienced Plan 9 users.
> >
> > I checked mail headers in this mailing list, seems all use Apple Mail,
> iPhone Mail, WebMail with AJAX, Gmail(a lot), ProtonMail,  these emails
> went through Postfix and Exim servers, probably on Linux.
> >
> > In great harmony, we use kinds of operating system and kinds of software
> on them.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Yubao Liu
> >
> >> On Jun 14, 2018, at 10:53 AM, N. S. Montanaro <nsm@airmail.cc> wrote:
> >>
> >> I think a lot of people discover Plan 9 and want it to be something it
> isn’t, rather than stumble upon it out of necessity. As the FQA says, “Plan
> 9 is not for you."
> >
>
>
>

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Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[刘宇宝]

// seems this email was lost according to http://marc.info/?l=9fans, send again, sorry if duplicated.

On Jun 24, 2018, at 5:12 PM, 刘宇宝 <liuyubao@yingmi.cn> wrote:

Very like your comment, thanks! On macOS I mainly use iTerm2 + VIM + SSH + Firefox, if Plan 9 had a decent native web browser I may use 9front for serious daily work. I don't care much native app stack because I mainly do Python/Java/Node on remote Linux server.

I hate trackpad, it hurts my wrists, I just got a cheap vertical mouse, may buy Evoluent mouse later. Meanwhile, I was wondering whether trackball will heal my wrists more.

Recently I read Rob Pike's "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant", I felt pity, and I was wondering what the operating system would look like in the future,  here is my stupid optimistic predication:

	• Server hardware will become extreme powerful,  TB DRAM, non-volatile memory, NVMe disk, 100Gb ethernet, the paradigm of separate cpu server, file server, (a little fat) terminals will come back to be mainstream,  network of piles of cheap PCs will go away.
	• Linux，even BSD，became the underlying device driver and "BIOS", this is almost the current situation, Linux KVM, Xen + Linux dom0 hide details of hardware. This layer takes care maximum hardware support and raw performance.
	• *Distributed* operating systems above KVM/Xen will step into a period of great development, hardware support and maximum raw performance are not top priorities, *OS native* fault tolerance, simple and clear distributed process scheduling, easy and consistent IPC/RPC API will win, Google Kubernetes will die. Many ideas of Plan 9 will revive, just like memory garbage collecting revived after about 30 years.

Regards,
Yubao Liu

> 
> From: 9fans-bounces@9fans.net <9fans-bounces@9fans.net> on behalf of Rui Carmo <rui.carmo@gmail.com>
> Sent: Thursday, June 21, 2018 5:06 PM
> To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs
> Subject: Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?
>  
> I’m late to the thread, but this seems like a good point to step in.
> 
> I’m using plan9 on a quad-core Raspberry Pi as a sort of universal terminal to manage some of my home machines, and recently deleted the 9front VM I had on my home KVM server because even though the programming model and Go support were nice, most of my day-to-day work is on cloud solutions and there was no easy way to make those co-exist with Plan9 usage.
> 
> There were a few discussions in this thread around dev stacks, browsers, etc., and my $0.02 on that is that I could probably work in Plan9 on a daily basis _if_ it had a usable (i.e., all the warts including JavaScript and fonts) web browser, but that the lack of alignment (intended or otherwise) with Linux tools and app stacks (SSH, Node, Python, Java) would make it very painful.
> 
> Running a remote browser (which is what I do often in that Pi) sort of works, but you never get the full benefits you’d get with a native process. And lack of access to modern app stacks renders the platform unattractive for mainstream development work.
> 
> But what killed it for me was the need for chording (mouse or keys). Using a modern trackpad on a MacBook or Surface device is a quantum leap beyond using a mouse for general use, and the lack of a modernised Rio with enough thoughtful design to overcome the differences in philosophy is the first barrier to continued usage.
> 
> Acme is something I miss on occasion, but modern GUI editors compensate in other ways (at the expense of resource usage, etc., but with a massive boost in productivity for me). Also, I’m typing this on an iMac 5K with nearly unmatched font rendering and legibility (the only thing that comes close is the Surface Pro alongside it). Visuals matter a great deal.
> 
> There is an unmatchable degree of purity in Plan9, but (even though the diehards will stick their ground and claim it’s perfect to the exclusion of other modern comforts) to coexist successfully it has to provide more affordances.
> 
> Kind Regards,
> 
> R.
> 
> > On 14 Jun 2018, at 04:53, 刘宇宝 <liuyubao@yingmi.cn> wrote:
> > 
> > Compared to "not for you", "don't care",  "intend to not be successful", I like more the topic of cat-v irc channel on freenode set by aiju:  "fun fact: you can use multiple operating systems at the same time".
> > 
> > Certainly Plan 9 can't replace Linux/macOS/BSD/Windows, I'm still curious its upper bound for a sensible daily usage,  and the best practice from you happy experienced Plan 9 users.
> > 
> > I checked mail headers in this mailing list, seems all use Apple Mail, iPhone Mail, WebMail with AJAX, Gmail(a lot), ProtonMail,  these emails went through Postfix and Exim servers, probably on Linux.
> > 
> > In great harmony, we use kinds of operating system and kinds of software on them.
> > 
> > Regards,
> > Yubao Liu
> > 
> >> On Jun 14, 2018, at 10:53 AM, N. S. Montanaro <nsm@airmail.cc> wrote:
> >> 
> >> I think a lot of people discover Plan 9 and want it to be something it isn’t, rather than stumble upon it out of necessity. As the FQA says, “Plan 9 is not for you."
> > 

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Tyga]

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Re: your comment about trackpad / vertical mouse.

I had a similar RSI problem a couple of years ago.  I solved it by using a
Logitech trackball with my right hand - but only to move the cursor and I
used a MS optical mouse with the tracking window taped over so that I would
only use it to click or scroll with the left hand.  I had to tape over the
window so that moving the mouse wouldn't actually move the pointer which I
had carefully positioned with the trackball.  Cured the RSI and now able to
even use a normal trackpad on a notebook for short periods of time.  But I
do prefer to use my desktop for serious amounts of work.



On 26 June 2018 at 13:24, 刘宇宝 <liuyubao@yingmi.cn> wrote:

> // seems this email was lost according to http://marc.info/?l=9fans, send
> again, sorry if duplicated.
>
> On Jun 24, 2018, at 5:12 PM, 刘宇宝 <liuyubao@yingmi.cn> wrote:
>
> Very like your comment, thanks! On macOS I mainly use iTerm2 + VIM + SSH +
> Firefox, if Plan 9 had a decent native web browser I may use 9front for
> serious daily work. I don't care much native app stack because I mainly do
> Python/Java/Node on remote Linux server.
>
> I hate trackpad, it hurts my wrists, I just got a cheap vertical mouse,
> may buy Evoluent mouse later. Meanwhile, I was wondering whether trackball
> will heal my wrists more.
>
> Recently I read Rob Pike's "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant", I
> felt pity, and I was wondering what the operating system would look like in
> the future,  here is my stupid optimistic predication:
>
>         • Server hardware will become extreme powerful,  TB DRAM,
> non-volatile memory, NVMe disk, 100Gb ethernet, the paradigm of separate
> cpu server, file server, (a little fat) terminals will come back to be
> mainstream,  network of piles of cheap PCs will go away.
>         • Linux，even BSD，became the underlying device driver and "BIOS",
> this is almost the current situation, Linux KVM, Xen + Linux dom0 hide
> details of hardware. This layer takes care maximum hardware support and raw
> performance.
>         • *Distributed* operating systems above KVM/Xen will step into a
> period of great development, hardware support and maximum raw performance
> are not top priorities, *OS native* fault tolerance, simple and clear
> distributed process scheduling, easy and consistent IPC/RPC API will win,
> Google Kubernetes will die. Many ideas of Plan 9 will revive, just like
> memory garbage collecting revived after about 30 years.
>
> Regards,
> Yubao Liu
>
> >
> > From: 9fans-bounces@9fans.net <9fans-bounces@9fans.net> on behalf of
> Rui Carmo <rui.carmo@gmail.com>
> > Sent: Thursday, June 21, 2018 5:06 PM
> > To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs
> > Subject: Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?
> >
> > I’m late to the thread, but this seems like a good point to step in.
> >
> > I’m using plan9 on a quad-core Raspberry Pi as a sort of universal
> terminal to manage some of my home machines, and recently deleted the
> 9front VM I had on my home KVM server because even though the programming
> model and Go support were nice, most of my day-to-day work is on cloud
> solutions and there was no easy way to make those co-exist with Plan9 usage.
> >
> > There were a few discussions in this thread around dev stacks, browsers,
> etc., and my $0.02 on that is that I could probably work in Plan9 on a
> daily basis _if_ it had a usable (i.e., all the warts including JavaScript
> and fonts) web browser, but that the lack of alignment (intended or
> otherwise) with Linux tools and app stacks (SSH, Node, Python, Java) would
> make it very painful.
> >
> > Running a remote browser (which is what I do often in that Pi) sort of
> works, but you never get the full benefits you’d get with a native process.
> And lack of access to modern app stacks renders the platform unattractive
> for mainstream development work.
> >
> > But what killed it for me was the need for chording (mouse or keys).
> Using a modern trackpad on a MacBook or Surface device is a quantum leap
> beyond using a mouse for general use, and the lack of a modernised Rio with
> enough thoughtful design to overcome the differences in philosophy is the
> first barrier to continued usage.
> >
> > Acme is something I miss on occasion, but modern GUI editors compensate
> in other ways (at the expense of resource usage, etc., but with a massive
> boost in productivity for me). Also, I’m typing this on an iMac 5K with
> nearly unmatched font rendering and legibility (the only thing that comes
> close is the Surface Pro alongside it). Visuals matter a great deal.
> >
> > There is an unmatchable degree of purity in Plan9, but (even though the
> diehards will stick their ground and claim it’s perfect to the exclusion of
> other modern comforts) to coexist successfully it has to provide more
> affordances.
> >
> > Kind Regards,
> >
> > R.
> >
> > > On 14 Jun 2018, at 04:53, 刘宇宝 <liuyubao@yingmi.cn> wrote:
> > >
> > > Compared to "not for you", "don't care",  "intend to not be
> successful", I like more the topic of cat-v irc channel on freenode set by
> aiju:  "fun fact: you can use multiple operating systems at the same time".
> > >
> > > Certainly Plan 9 can't replace Linux/macOS/BSD/Windows, I'm still
> curious its upper bound for a sensible daily usage,  and the best practice
> from you happy experienced Plan 9 users.
> > >
> > > I checked mail headers in this mailing list, seems all use Apple Mail,
> iPhone Mail, WebMail with AJAX, Gmail(a lot), ProtonMail,  these emails
> went through Postfix and Exim servers, probably on Linux.
> > >
> > > In great harmony, we use kinds of operating system and kinds of
> software on them.
> > >
> > > Regards,
> > > Yubao Liu
> > >
> > >> On Jun 14, 2018, at 10:53 AM, N. S. Montanaro <nsm@airmail.cc> wrote:
> > >>
> > >> I think a lot of people discover Plan 9 and want it to be something
> it isn’t, rather than stumble upon it out of necessity. As the FQA says,
> “Plan 9 is not for you."
> > >
>
>

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Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Ethan A. Gardener]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2018, at 7:36 AM, Tyga wrote:
> Re: your comment about trackpad / vertical mouse.
> 
> I had a similar RSI problem a couple of years ago.  I solved it by using a Logitech trackball with my right hand - but only to move the cursor and I used a MS optical mouse with the tracking window taped over so that I would only use it to click or scroll with the left hand.  I had to tape over the window so that moving the mouse wouldn't actually move the pointer which I had carefully positioned with the trackball.  Cured the RSI and now able to even use a normal trackpad on a notebook for short periods of time.  But I do prefer to use my desktop for serious amounts of work.

Good to know! I have a Twiddler one-handed keyboard with a poor pointer control stick, but at least it has 3 buttons. I should try using it with a mouse like this. I've also enjoyed playing Minecraft with the mouse buttons remapped to keys. It's basically the same thing: movement right-handed, buttons left-handed. 

My major problem with mouse or keyboard is arm support. I'm "tall sitting down", so I need armrests and a desk much higher than average. I remember a normal mouse being fine so long as the desk was high enough. 

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Ethan A. Gardener]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2018, at 4:24 AM, 刘宇宝 wrote:
> 
> Recently I read Rob Pike's "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant", I 
> felt pity, and I was wondering what the operating system would look like 
> in the future,  here is my stupid optimistic predication:

I felt sad when I read it too, but like you, I hope the prevalence of KVM 
will bring a new wave of OS development. :)

> 
> 	• Server hardware will become extreme powerful,  TB DRAM, non-volatile 
> memory, NVMe disk, 100Gb ethernet, the paradigm of separate cpu server, 
> file server, (a little fat) terminals will come back to be mainstream,  
> network of piles of cheap PCs will go away.
> 	• Linux，even BSD，became the underlying device driver and "BIOS", this 
> is almost the current situation, Linux KVM, Xen + Linux dom0 hide 
> details of hardware. This layer takes care maximum hardware support and 
> raw performance.
> 	• *Distributed* operating systems above KVM/Xen will step into a period 
> of great development, hardware support and maximum raw performance are 
> not top priorities, *OS native* fault tolerance, simple and clear 
> distributed process scheduling, easy and consistent IPC/RPC API will 
> win, Google Kubernetes will die. Many ideas of Plan 9 will revive, just 
> like memory garbage collecting revived after about 30 years.
> 
> Regards,
> Yubao Liu
> 

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Tyga]

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I fear that I might be starting a flame war, but ...

I have been using Plan9 (and Inferno to a lesser extent) on and off for
about two decades.  The concepts are very enticing.  But like any other
niche OS (e.g. Minix) the biggest stumbling block seems to be device
drivers.  And display adaptors are one of the most challenging for device
drivers which in turn means that anything that depends on X, etc is going
to be a challenge.  Sound cards, etc are almost as bad.

For these reasons Plan9 struggles to become more widely adopted as a
desktop system and in turn porting programs is either taken on as a
challenge or labour of love.  So it is not surprising that the utilities
that you mention are lagging behind the ports to more widely used platforms.

To answer your question, there are a some people who use Plan9 seriously,
but I doubt that their numbers will ever become much larger. Personally, I
would like to use Plan9 for servers, but due to the development toolchain
issues I keep going back to Linux variants.

Wishing you continued with your adventure series.


On 11 June 2018 at 16:14, 刘宇宝 <liuyubao@yingmi.cn> wrote:

> Yesterday night I finished the sixth article of my Plan 9 adventure series
> at Zhihu, a Chinese Quora like site, https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/c_
> 185117725
>
> I feel many things are interesting and special, such as Rio(simple and
> beautiful, love it), Acme(so easy to extend), 9p(simple and clean),
> rc(right shell), but I'm still not very used to heavy use of mouse.
>
> I find a bunch of game emulators, instruction simulators, fs servers,
> incomplete POSIX environment, all seem very old, this makes me wondering
> whether anybody still seriously uses(or used?) Plan 9 for serious work,
> what software they frequently use, what software is most lack of.
>
> For my daily work and hobby, I use macOS for Desktop and Linux for
> Server,  most frequently used softwares include:
>
> * iTerm2+Vim+Spacemacs:         I can use Acme + rc instead.
> * SSH:          Plan9 has an old SSH client.
> * Perl, Python, NodeJS: Probably I can't get latest versions and enough
> support for their C extensions, it's basically fine, I can edit it with
> Acme and run on Linux.
> * VirtualBox:   I haven't played vmx.
> * Firefox:              I heard there is an old version running on X.
> Abaco and Mothra are not enough to render correctly most (crappy) web pages.
> * Apple Mail:   haven't played upasfs, I guess this is enough.
> * Wechat:       certainly not exist on Plan 9, it's fine,  it doesn't
> exist on Linux too.
> * Video Player:  don't know any on Plan 9.
>
> So far, seems the most lacking software for me is a good enough Web
> browser.
>
> Oh, don't get me wrong, I don't care whether Plan 9 will win the market,
> I'm just curious whether Plan 9 can still be used seriously.
>
> Thanks,
> Yubao Liu
>
>
>
>

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Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Steve Simon]

I too have run plan9 since the early 2000s, and plan to stick with it.

> And display adaptors are one of the most challenging for device
> drivers which in turn means that anything that depends on X, etc is going
> to be a challenge.  Sound cards, etc are almost as bad.

I think things have changed quite a bit, display driver problems mostly disappeared when vesa support
arrived (abet unaccelerated), and ac97 provided support for basic sound cards.

The bigger problem today is the lack of a modern web browser.

There have been many attempts from fgb's abaco, updates of mothra, chyron (sp?) from inferno,
and cinap's linuxemu wrapping around opera. Sadly none of these works well enough for me
to mean I can live without another OS.

My current solution at work is a windows laptop (shut) with a raspberry pi running plan9. I use
remote desktop to the windows box for web browsing and a some other company stuff.

I develop code for a living and regard plan9 as my IDE. I still love the interface, and my fingers
know it well.

I have a file/cpu/auth/dns/mail/cifs server at home running plan9. But I also need a Mac and
several ipads for me and the kids.

-Steve

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[tlaronde]

On Thu, Jun 14, 2018 at 03:22:24PM +0100, Steve Simon wrote:
>
> The bigger problem today is the lack of a modern web browser.
>

FWIW, there is a javascript engine in C:

http://duktape.org/

and a browser if I'm not mistaken written in C (there is the choice
between are several distinct graphical libraries to link against, but
one can also directly write to a framebuffer or to a dumb window):

http://www.netsurf-browser.org/

(netsurf uses duktape) that could be a starting point for someone with
time to tackle the task.

I sometime consider it but I'm almost at the point of trashing (too many
things to do and finally spending most time to switch from one task to
the other, trying the most part of the slot to restore the context---where
was I, what had to be done and how?---, without not much being done
eventually...)

YMMV,
--
        Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
                     http://www.kergis.com/
                       http://www.sbfa.fr/
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89  250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[hiro]

the problem with supporting a modern web browser is not so much a
matter of programming, the biggest problems are of political nature.

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Daniel Camoles]

On Thu, Jun 14, 2018 at 03:22:24PM +0100, Steve Simon wrote:
> The bigger problem today is the lack of a modern web browser.
>
> There have been many attempts from fgb's abaco, updates of mothra, chyron (sp?) from inferno,
> and cinap's linuxemu wrapping around opera. Sadly none of these works well enough for me
> to mean I can live without another OS.

Well I don't know if it solves your problem, but you could run openbsd from
inside vmx, and then run a browser like chrome in there. Works perfectly.
You probably could substitute openbsd for linux or other, vmx is fully functional.

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Mart Zirnask]

On 14/06/2018, Daniel Camoles <bigatojj@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Well I don't know if it solves your problem, but you could run openbsd from
>
> inside vmx, and then run a browser like chrome in there. Works perfectly.
> You probably could substitute openbsd for linux or other, vmx is fully
> functional.
>

+1, and there's also good old 9vx:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Vx32

I'm typing this on a Thinkpad T42 with Tiny Core Linux and 9vx.

I'm reluctant to throw out technology that works and serves my basic
needs (and has IPS screen + good keyboard + quiet CF card in place of
hard disk), so this is the only computer I have.

I'm a part-time writer and radio producer with no CS background, so I
even use this machine for producing 1-hour radio shows for Estonian
Public Broadcasting. (Thank you, Non Daw!: http://non.tuxfamily.org).

I just love the "zen" of sam (and, occasionally, Acme) as a writing
tool. Also, the idea of "everything is a file" kind of grows on you,
intellectually.

P9P needed too much fiddling for Tiny Core Linux (and thus also broke
the simplicity and extreme minimalism of that Linux distro for me). So
I eventually opted for 9vx.

Tiny Core Linux boots into RAM, so Chromium and Firefox run
surprisingly fast on that old machine, for my occasional, mostly
"journalistic" needs. And it also has Dillo, which I've grown to love.

That said, I would switch to 9front + vmx immediately. (I even
conceptualized an awk-based "suite" for audio montage for Acme, using
the "everything is a file" paradigm".)

Unfortunately my Intel 2200bg wifi card doesn't seem to work in
9front. Has somebody maybe finished rsc's driver in the meanwhile?

I would also like to thank sl for all the 9artwork. I think this level
of aesthetics and intellectual humor is unmatched in the world of OS
"marketing"; this is probably what drew me in in the first place.

So 9front is an OS (isn't it?), but it's also a project of conceptual art. :)

Ah, also:
my dream machine would be a Alphasmart Neo device with BSD + sam -d:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart

Unfortunately, as I understand, porting BSD for that is not so easy.

Best,
Mart

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Lucio De Re]

On 6/15/18, Mart Zirnask <martzirnask@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> +1, and there's also good old 9vx:
> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Vx32
>
Great news. I've upgraded my Linux Mint to 64-buit ad I've been
reluctant to experiment with 9vx, which I really like a lot. Can you
confirm thatit runs OK under 64-bit Linux? Do I need to add any
special bits, different from p9p, to get it to compile?

It's been a while since I had occasion to build either of those and
some reassurance will be encouraging.

Lucio.

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[hiro]

9vx only works on 32bit linux userland. and cinap reminds us that 9vx
is not synced to latest improvements in 9front kernel.
he's already maintaining drawterm and keeping it synced with 9front.
even if he had infinite time, 32bit might turn out to be a dead-end
anyway, so it's probably better to use virtualization. linux on 9front
or 9front in kvm on linux with drawterm for interaction.

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Mart Zirnask]

hiro <23hiro@gmail.com> wrote:
> 9vx only works on 32bit linux userland. and cinap reminds us that 9vx
> is not synced to latest improvements in 9front kernel.

Thanks. I was planning to try out 9front with 9vx; now I won't bother.
9legacy has been running fine for me.

Mart

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Lucio De Re]

On 6/15/18, hiro <23hiro@gmail.com> wrote:
> 9vx only works on 32bit linux userland. and cinap reminds us that 9vx
> is not synced to latest improvements in 9front kernel.
> he's already maintaining drawterm and keeping it synced with 9front.
> even if he had infinite time, 32bit might turn out to be a dead-end
> anyway, so it's probably better to use virtualization. linux on 9front
> or 9front in kvm on linux with drawterm for interaction.
>
Thank you, that's the type of thing one loses track of. I have
adequate Plan 9 resources where my roots have settled, but they don't
travel. I used to have a public Plan 9 CPU server, but, again,
conditions have changed and that is not viable right now.

I appreciate you taking the trouble to explain where we're at.

Lucio.

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Mark van Atten]

On Fri, Jun 15, 2018 at 8:13 AM, Mart Zirnask <martzirnask@gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm a part-time writer and radio producer with no CS background, so I
> even use this machine for producing 1-hour radio shows for Estonian
> Public Broadcasting. (Thank you, Non Daw!: http://non.tuxfamily.org).
>
> I just love the "zen" of sam (and, occasionally, Acme) as a writing
> tool. Also, the idea of "everything is a file" kind of grows on you,
> intellectually.

I'm a philosopher and use sam and acme every day to write papers
in LaTeX.

With his KerTeX project, Thierry Laronde has done, and is doing, great
work for TeX on Plan 9.
It would be great to have LuaTeX as well.

I also use p9p and its rio on FreeBSD.

Mark.

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Iruatã Souza]

On Fri, Jun 15, 2018 at 12:02 PM, Mark van Atten <vanattenmark@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 15, 2018 at 8:13 AM, Mart Zirnask <martzirnask@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I'm a part-time writer and radio producer with no CS background, so I
>> even use this machine for producing 1-hour radio shows for Estonian
>> Public Broadcasting. (Thank you, Non Daw!: http://non.tuxfamily.org).
>>
>> I just love the "zen" of sam (and, occasionally, Acme) as a writing
>> tool. Also, the idea of "everything is a file" kind of grows on you,
>> intellectually.
>
> I'm a philosopher and use sam and acme every day to write papers
> in LaTeX.
>
> With his KerTeX project, Thierry Laronde has done, and is doing, great
> work for TeX on Plan 9.
> It would be great to have LuaTeX as well.
>

Did you (or Thierry) tried running LuaTeX? I have "ported" lua ages
ago to Plan 9 and it was pretty easy, but I know nothing about LuaTex
internals or the relation between both.

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[tlaronde]

On Fri, Jun 15, 2018 at 04:58:35PM -0700, Iruatã Souza wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 15, 2018 at 12:02 PM, Mark van Atten <vanattenmark@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, Jun 15, 2018 at 8:13 AM, Mart Zirnask <martzirnask@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> I'm a part-time writer and radio producer with no CS background, so I
> >> even use this machine for producing 1-hour radio shows for Estonian
> >> Public Broadcasting. (Thank you, Non Daw!: http://non.tuxfamily.org).
> >>
> >> I just love the "zen" of sam (and, occasionally, Acme) as a writing
> >> tool. Also, the idea of "everything is a file" kind of grows on you,
> >> intellectually.
> >
> > I'm a philosopher and use sam and acme every day to write papers
> > in LaTeX.
> >
> > With his KerTeX project, Thierry Laronde has done, and is doing, great
> > work for TeX on Plan 9.
> > It would be great to have LuaTeX as well.
> >
> 
> Did you (or Thierry) tried running LuaTeX? I have "ported" lua ages
> ago to Plan 9 and it was pretty easy, but I know nothing about LuaTex
> internals or the relation between both.

I personnaly have not tried. The main problem are the dependencies. If it depends
only on C and WEB, it should be easy. If secondary dependencies (like
generating PDF instead of DVI) draw C++ libraries in the way...

FWIW, at the moment I think that, if I put aside the conversion to utf-8
as input (with dir of 256 glyphes fonts), the main lack is the inability
to display the result without depending on gs(1). So I'd like to have,
for the different OSes, a rendering of the DVI. Then extend DVI so that
it supports the primitives needed by MetaPOST (leading to a MetaDVI). And then
a front end for a dvi2x driver.

This does not mean that I exclude LuaTeX per se. I have to see and I
have to find slots of time (and to try to fit a task in the actual slots
so that "something" is finished---I have already several things kerTeX
related started but none finished...).

Best,
-- 
        Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
                     http://www.kergis.com/
                       http://www.sbfa.fr/
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89  250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Mark van Atten]

On Sat, Jun 16, 2018 at 1:58 AM, Iruatã Souza <iru.muzgo@gmail.com> wrote:

> Did you (or Thierry) tried running LuaTeX? I have "ported" lua ages
> ago to Plan 9 and it was pretty easy, but I know nothing about LuaTex
> internals or the relation between both.

Indeed, I had noted your port with interest, for this reason. But I
would be out of my depth there, so I can't say anything as informed as
what Thierry has written.

Mark.

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[hiro]

> For these reasons Plan9 struggles to become more widely adopted as a
> desktop system and in turn porting programs is either taken on as a
> challenge or labour of love.
It's good most people don't do direct ports. A plan9-specific
reinterpretation is so much more interesting.

> So it is not surprising that the utilities
> that you mention are lagging behind the ports to more widely used
> platforms.
Many times programs on other platforms are also lagging behind proven
plan9 technology by multiple decades.

> To answer your question, there are a some people who use Plan9 seriously,
> but I doubt that their numbers will ever become much larger.
Some Plan9 users also got enlightened and stopped using computers
altogether. The step is not big.

> Personally, I
> would like to use Plan9 for servers
What kind of servers are you thinking of? For what application?

> but due to the development toolchain
> issues I keep going back to Linux variants.
What toolchain, which issues?

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Ethan A. Gardener]

On Mon, Jun 11, 2018, at 7:14 AM, 刘宇宝 wrote:
> this makes me wondering 
> whether anybody still seriously uses(or used?) Plan 9 for serious work, 
> what software they frequently use, what software is most lack of.

For many years I used it and especially Acme to try to organise my life, including every area of interest I had. Plan 9 and Acme played their parts quite well. I even had multiple Acme sessions running, each with its own plumber. Some windows held sub-instances of Rio, again with their own plumber instances, for projects requiring graphics or PDFs. 

Another use I had for it was playing MUDs, MUSHes, MU* -- telnet-based multi-player games. I particularly liked Rio's "noscroll" feature in this case, as I could catch up with all the messages at my own pace. In fact, I very much like noscroll in general. On the other hand, the lack of color meant I could miss things sometimes, such as a clue in a room description or a private message while travelling -- noscroll isn't really feasible when you're following someone rapidly through a dozen rooms, each with their own description. I never got around to filtering different kinds of messages into different windows. I should have.

Overall, I asked Plan 9 to do quite a lot of things it wasn't really designed for, without writing a bit of C code, and for the most part it proved remarkably convenient. Frustration eventually built up over some things, particularly all the string manipulation -- converting data between the different programs' needs -- when, even after all these years of practice, I am _still_ bad at regular expressions! I developed ideas about another operating system with structured pipes, but around this time I learned to relax. I dropped most of my projects, stopped trying to play so many games so hard, and no longer needed Plan 9 to help me organize it all.

Ironically perhaps, relaxing has freed my creativity so that I'm now programming more than at any time since before I started using Plan 9 full time. Most of it is going into game scripting at the moment, but on the back burner is a Forth-based project; a sort of operating system where the primary interface to all tasks is a Forth interpreter. So far, I've written the basics of a text editor. It's *very* little code! Plan 9 is a very expressive system for how little code it has, but this seems to be a major step beyond that. It's a bit too early to really tell. 

It offers the full power of a systems programming language at the editor prompt. If that sounds like a problem, it's not yet. If it ever becomes a problem for common tasks, I can write safer, higher-level, and probably more convenient words (=functions, =commands,) to handle those tasks. That's arguably how the text editor's basics already work. For instance, change-dotlen performs safety checks before calling the (dangerous, powerful,) move word to adjust the contents of the buffer for inserted or deleted text. rdot ("replace dot") is a user command which calls change-dotlen to do most of the work, then calls move again to copy the string into the buffer. change-dotlen is well tested, rdot is so simple there are obviously no faults. :) (That's not something I really believe in, I tested it too.) None of the other user commands call move, they adjust dot and then call rdot. Adjusting dot means a call to dot! (dot-store), which also has safety checks.

When all the necessary tools are written, there's just no need to use the unsafe features, but neither is there a need to partition those features off into compiled program space. There's no need to learn five different languages for one task, and if you want to point out that a Forth system may well include lots of mini-languages, there's no need for the mini-languages to have -- or LACK -- their own loops, conditionals, variables, or function definitions, not to mention jammed-into-a-string terse syntaxes.

I'd better stop here because I'm getting enthusiastic. :) It is early days yet, I may have to retract some of my beliefs in the future. I still have a Plan 9 system which is almost always on, but now I no longer have a desk of the right proportions to make mouse use comfortable, and can no longer bend over a laptop for hours on end, (a Thinkpad with 3 buttons,) text editing in Plan 9 has become unpleasant. I could patch Samterm and Rio to make it more comfortable, but it's not worth it. 

-- 
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne. -- Chaucer

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Lucio De Re]

On 6/20/18, Ethan A. Gardener <eekee57@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> [ ... ] Most of it is going into game scripting at the moment, but on the back
> burner is a Forth-based project; a sort of operating system where the
> primary interface to all tasks is a Forth interpreter. [ ... ]

Bakul may not agree, but that sounds like a novel take on APL.
Different underlying syntax, but conceptually quite similar. Forth is
one of those things that happened while I wasn't watching, so I'm not
at all familiar with it, so it makes sense for me to use the model I
know, but this sounds quite intriguing.

Do you know APL and/or any of its derivatives? You'd bit a better
judge. The idea of the full interpreter at the command line is a
powerful one and APL's one liners handle much better the shortcomings
of any Unix shell's regarding multi-line constructs.

It would interesting to explore your particular take on this and place
it in a broader context.

Lucio.

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Bakul Shah]

On Thu, 21 Jun 2018 05:58:42 +0200 Lucio De Re <lucio.dere@gmail.com> wrote:
Lucio De Re writes:
> On 6/20/18, Ethan A. Gardener <eekee57@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> > [ ... ] Most of it is going into game scripting at the moment, but on the b
> ack
> > burner is a Forth-based project; a sort of operating system where the
> > primary interface to all tasks is a Forth interpreter. [ ... ]
> 
> Bakul may not agree, but that sounds like a novel take on APL.
> Different underlying syntax, but conceptually quite similar. Forth is
> one of those things that happened while I wasn't watching, so I'm not
> at all familiar with it, so it makes sense for me to use the model I
> know, but this sounds quite intriguing.

As a matter of fact some APLers are quite fascinated with
"concatenative" languages like Forth, Joy, Factor etc.!

> Do you know APL and/or any of its derivatives? You'd bit a better
> judge. The idea of the full interpreter at the command line is a
> powerful one and APL's one liners handle much better the shortcomings
> of any Unix shell's regarding multi-line constructs.

There are some conceptual similarities between stream
programming using shell pipelines and array programing using
APL/j/k/q. Array programming is richer as you can pass many
different things, not just character streams.

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Ethan A. Gardener]

On Thu, Jun 21, 2018, at 5:49 AM, Bakul Shah wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Jun 2018 05:58:42 +0200 Lucio De Re <lucio.dere@gmail.com> wrote:
> Lucio De Re writes:
> > On 6/20/18, Ethan A. Gardener <eekee57@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> > > [ ... ] Most of it is going into game scripting at the moment, but on the b
> > ack
> > > burner is a Forth-based project; a sort of operating system where the
> > > primary interface to all tasks is a Forth interpreter. [ ... ]
> >
> > Bakul may not agree, but that sounds like a novel take on APL.
> > Different underlying syntax, but conceptually quite similar. Forth is
> > one of those things that happened while I wasn't watching, so I'm not
> > at all familiar with it, so it makes sense for me to use the model I
> > know, but this sounds quite intriguing.
>
> As a matter of fact some APLers are quite fascinated with
> "concatenative" languages like Forth, Joy, Factor etc.!

Interesting!
>
> > Do you know APL and/or any of its derivatives? You'd bit a better
> > judge. The idea of the full interpreter at the command line is a
> > powerful one and APL's one liners handle much better the shortcomings
> > of any Unix shell's regarding multi-line constructs.
>
> There are some conceptual similarities between stream
> programming using shell pipelines and array programing using
> APL/j/k/q. Array programming is richer as you can pass many
> different things, not just character streams.

It's very much what I've been hoping to achieve, then.
I'll definitely look into it.

--
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne. -- Chaucer

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Ethan A. Gardener]

On Thu, Jun 21, 2018, at 4:58 AM, Lucio De Re wrote:
> On 6/20/18, Ethan A. Gardener <eekee57@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> > [ ... ] Most of it is going into game scripting at the moment, but on the back
> > burner is a Forth-based project; a sort of operating system where the
> > primary interface to all tasks is a Forth interpreter. [ ... ]
>
> Bakul may not agree, but that sounds like a novel take on APL.
> Different underlying syntax, but conceptually quite similar.

I knew it must have been done before, but APL is one of the many things I never got around to looking into.

> Forth is
> one of those things that happened while I wasn't watching, so I'm not
> at all familiar with it, so it makes sense for me to use the model I
> know, but this sounds quite intriguing.
>
> Do you know APL and/or any of its derivatives? You'd bit a better
> judge. The idea of the full interpreter at the command line is a
> powerful one and APL's one liners handle much better the shortcomings
> of any Unix shell's regarding multi-line constructs.
>
> It would interesting to explore your particular take on this and place
> it in a broader context.

Thanks! I don't know APL at all, beyond the fact that its need for a graphical (or at least sophisticated) display held it back in the past. I should probably look into it now, I'm sure it would save me from making some mistakes in my design.

>
> Lucio.
>


--
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne. -- Chaucer

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Bakul Shah]

On Jun 21, 2018, at 8:23 AM, Ethan A. Gardener <eekee57@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> 
> Thanks! I don't know APL at all, beyond the fact that its need for a graphical (or at least sophisticated) display held it back in the past. I should probably look into it now, I'm sure it would save me from making some mistakes in my design.

Languages j, k & q are ascii only. K is
quite minimalist (compared to APL & j).
I quite like Scheme, k and plan9 for
their minimalist aesthetics.

Arthur Whitney, k’s designer, had told
me he was making it run on bare metal.
He was muttering about how Linux just
gets in the way! Though I don’t know if
he actually did that.

Another crazy bare metal tale: A few
years before Eben Upton came up with
Raspberry Pi, he had ported cpython to
run on the videocore on a GPU only
chip (bcm2707) using custom software
hackery. Using python like BASIC is a great idea!

Personally I’d prefer something like k, Scheme, python or lua (and not forth) to boot into. I am admire forth but I’m
not a fan of *programming* in stack languages!

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Ethan A. Gardener]

On Thu, Jun 21, 2018, at 7:03 PM, Bakul Shah wrote:
> On Jun 21, 2018, at 8:23 AM, Ethan A. Gardener <eekee57@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> > 
> > Thanks! I don't know APL at all, beyond the fact that its need for a graphical (or at least sophisticated) display held it back in the past. I should probably look into it now, I'm sure it would save me from making some mistakes in my design.
> 
> Languages j, k & q are ascii only. K is
> quite minimalist (compared to APL & j).
> I quite like Scheme, k and plan9 for
> their minimalist aesthetics.

I have briefly used q and pure, but I remember nothing practical about
them, only that pure is a verbose q.  I've looked into APL a little
now, got an introduction from a 1975 video which was interesting and a
little amusing, and had a look at aiju's k pages --
http://aiju.de/code/k/ . I think the idea of combining operators is
really cool, but I'm certain I'd get mixed up with both APL and k in
the same way I struggle with regexps.  Pure would be better, but I
haven't heard mention of it since that one time I tried it.  This
amuses me because its documentation stated in true Gnu style, "q is
unmaintained, new projects should use pure."

I picked up an idea from microapl.com, workspaces.  Saving system
state is one of my goals for my OS, and the concept of workspaces
pertaining to separate tasks keeps popping up when I get ideas.  For
those who don't know, it's this:

Quoting from http://www.microapl.com/apl/introduction_chapter1.html
> In addition, it has a very useful concept called the
> workspace.  This is basically a collection of the data
> items, functions, and classes which you set up in the course
> of doing a particular job.
> 
> The workspace is in computer memory while you work, making
> everything you want immediately accessible.  It can be saved
> (i.e.  copied on to a disc) in its entirety when you stop,
> and loaded back into memory next time you want to use it.

I'm finding other relevant ideas in that introduction, too.


> 
> Arthur Whitney, k’s designer, had told
> me he was making it run on bare metal.
> He was muttering about how Linux just
> gets in the way! Though I don’t know if
> he actually did that.

Bare metal dreams!  I have similar ambitions for my Forth OS, of
course.  :) This is where things like OpenFirmware are good, because
you get a bunch of drivers for free.  They may not offer the highest
performance, but when developing an OS on your own, I'm sure they'd
save a lot of time and frustration.  And you may get things which
might be last on your list to implement, like the webcam in an OLPC.

> 
> Another crazy bare metal tale: A few
> years before Eben Upton came up with
> Raspberry Pi, he had ported cpython to
> run on the videocore on a GPU only
> chip (bcm2707) using custom software
> hackery. Using python like BASIC is a great idea!

Wild!  :) It's better than, but reminds me of the time I compiled
Python to run alone on the Linux kernel.  I was lazy, I didn't want to
reimplement utilities like mount, and so I left it.  Now, I think I
should have pushed myself to implement those and a text editor too.
It would have boosted my skills over a decade ago.

> 
> Personally I’d prefer something like k, Scheme, python or lua (and not 
> forth) to boot into. I am admire forth but I’m
> not a fan of *programming* in stack languages!

Python and Tcl were on my list for my OS. I don't recall thinking of
lisps except elisp for some reason.  Anyway, I had high hopes for
Forth's sequential nature.  It is quite good, especially for the wide
range of tasks I want to apply it to; the syntax is so flexible!  As I
said, I have trouble with regexps, and printf isn't far behind.
Here's example usage for a sprintf-like system from Swift Forth:

    <%  S" This is a test " %s  DPL @ %d  S"  finally" %s %cr %>

Literal strings, variable references, and escapes go in their logical
order.  There's no need for escapes to be just one character.  These
are features I want.  As I write this, I realize that this all could
be done in other languages with minor syntax variations.  I can
imagine it in Python as a tuple containing literal strings and the
names of members of a class.  In Lisp, a list with strings and
symbols.  (Do symbols work the same way in Scheme?) I'm thinking it
over, but I may stick with Forth for other reasons.  I haven't ruled
out implementing some of my project in another language to see how it
compares.

Other reasons I like Forth are its efficiency (relative to Python and
maybe Lisp), the fact that very low level work is natural, and
especially the great simplicity of Forth interpreters.  The stack can
be a bit of a pain, but not as much as I expected, and it's what
enables that flexible syntax.  It helps to break code up into very
small definitions, although it's not always obvious how to break it
up.  Also, in other languages I sometimes find myself fighting some
aspect of the language; the language itself gets in the way.  I can't
see that happening with Forth, it doesn't have the same constraints.
(Some Forth document made the same point.) The idea seems to be:
instead of constraints, test every little part.  A REPL makes that
reasonable.

Forth also taught me how to think better; some improvements I'd failed
to pick up in any amount of Python or C, but that's probably just me.

-- 
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne. -- Chaucer

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[刘宇宝]

> On Jun 25, 2018, at 5:33 PM, Ethan A. Gardener <eekee57@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> 
> 
> I picked up an idea from microapl.com, workspaces.  Saving system
> state is one of my goals for my OS, and the concept of workspaces
> pertaining to separate tasks keeps popping up when I get ideas.  For
> those who don't know, it's this:
> 

Lisp and Smalltalk both have similar thing,  dump whole image (or "world") to disk and load to memory next time.

The GUI of Lisp Machine and Squeak looks elegant, of course Rio is very elegant too :-)

* https://static.loomcom.com/genera/genera-install.html
* https://squeak.org/

Regards,
Yubao Liu

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Ethan A. Gardener]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2018, at 6:17 AM, 刘宇宝 wrote:
> 
> 
> > On Jun 25, 2018, at 5:33 PM, Ethan A. Gardener <eekee57@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > I picked up an idea from microapl.com, workspaces.  Saving system
> > state is one of my goals for my OS, and the concept of workspaces
> > pertaining to separate tasks keeps popping up when I get ideas.  For
> > those who don't know, it's this:
> > 
> 
> Lisp and Smalltalk both have similar thing,  dump whole image (or 
> "world") to disk and load to memory next time.

I was sure something else saved the world ( :) ) too, but I couldn't remember. Of course Lisp and Smalltalk do it. It is a bit of a risk doing it in Forth because memory corruption is more likely, but I think it can work with careful, not-too-simple saving code -- checksums perhaps.

> 
> The GUI of Lisp Machine and Squeak looks elegant, of course Rio is very 
> elegant too :-)
> 
> * https://static.loomcom.com/genera/genera-install.html
> * https://squeak.org/

Squeak is another thing I "should have" properly tried. It was the basis for this 3D environment where, instead of sending all the data to all clients, code snippets were sent instead. The clients were synchronized so they all rendered the same. Moving around made me dizzy, though.

> 
> Regards,
> Yubao Liu
> 


-- 
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne. -- Chaucer

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Bakul Shah]

On Jun 25, 2018, at 2:33 AM, Ethan A. Gardener <eekee57@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Jun 21, 2018, at 7:03 PM, Bakul Shah wrote:
>> On Jun 21, 2018, at 8:23 AM, Ethan A. Gardener <eekee57@fastmail.fm> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Thanks! I don't know APL at all, beyond the fact that its need for a graphical (or at least sophisticated) display held it back in the past. I should probably look into it now, I'm sure it would save me from making some mistakes in my design.
>> 
>> Languages j, k & q are ascii only. K is
>> quite minimalist (compared to APL & j).
>> I quite like Scheme, k and plan9 for
>> their minimalist aesthetics.
> 
> I have briefly used q and pure, but I remember nothing practical about
> them, only that pure is a verbose q.  I've looked into APL a little
> now, got an introduction from a 1975 video which was interesting and a
> little amusing, and had a look at aiju's k pages --

I was talking about kx.com's array language q, which is a thin layer
on top of k4 and it quite SQLish. Very different from the equational
language Q or pure.

> http://aiju.de/code/k/ . I think the idea of combining operators is
> really cool, but I'm certain I'd get mixed up with both APL and k in
> the same way I struggle with regexps.

stream programming rc/sh style is a bit like array programming.
In sh you'd write

	f < inputFile | g | h
or
	f < inputFile | g | h > outputFile

In an apl (array prog. lang.) such as k you'd write

	h g f inputArray
or
	outputArray: h g f inputArray
	
Of course,
a) there is no side channel of stderr for apls.
b) apls have a lot of functions built in, while shells do not
   and rely on external programs.
c) apls use variables where shells use external files.

To operate on a number of files, in sh you'd have to do

	for x in a b c; do f $x | g | h ; done

in k you'd use the each operator ('):

	{h g f x}'(a;b;c)

A shell can only use pipes (byte streams) to connect functions
(implemented as programs). In contrast apls have much richer
data types and functions.

An interesting experiment would be to try to combine the two
models in one language.

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Kurt H Maier]

On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 10:35:42PM +0100, Ethan A. Gardener wrote:
>
> a sort of operating system where the primary interface to all tasks is
> a Forth interpreter.

I think we've talked about this in another venue some years back, but I
often thing of the OpenFirmware implementation used by the OLPC XO-1
laptop.  Instead of a BIOS or UEFI or linux trash in their stead, the
system was managed by an OpenFirmware installation, much of which was
written in Forth, and whose primary interface was a Forth shell.  This
environment had complete access to the hardware of the system, which
was used by the project to create really comprehensive hardware
diagnostics tools.

I mostly used it for screwing around, but it was fairly complete; it
supported the wifi hardware and the webcam, and I often thought I'd like
a computer that just booted into this environment and stayed there.  I'm
glad to hear you're still experimenting along these lines.  There's a
lot of value in a system whose primary interface is the programming
environment.  I work with computers because of the Commodore VIC-20...
and I wonder if I'd have ever given a damn about the field if my first
exposure to computers involved a Modern User Experience.

khM

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Ethan A. Gardener]

On Thu, Jun 21, 2018, at 6:39 AM, Kurt H Maier wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 10:35:42PM +0100, Ethan A. Gardener wrote:
> >
> > a sort of operating system where the primary interface to all tasks is
> > a Forth interpreter.
>
> I think we've talked about this in another venue some years back, but I
> often thing of the OpenFirmware implementation used by the OLPC XO-1
> laptop.  Instead of a BIOS or UEFI or linux trash in their stead, the
> system was managed by an OpenFirmware installation, much of which was
> written in Forth, and whose primary interface was a Forth shell.  This
> environment had complete access to the hardware of the system, which
> was used by the project to create really comprehensive hardware
> diagnostics tools.

I do too. My Mac just boots to OpenFirmware now. It's a bit broken, being early Apple OFw, but that was what prompted me to start work -- it needs a text editor. OFw is an ANS Forth, and I'm working with the goal of running on multiple such ANS Forth platforms.

>
> I mostly used it for screwing around, but it was fairly complete; it
> supported the wifi hardware and the webcam, and I often thought I'd like
> a computer that just booted into this environment and stayed there.  I'm
> glad to hear you're still experimenting along these lines.

Thanks!

> There's a
> lot of value in a system whose primary interface is the programming
> environment.  I work with computers because of the Commodore VIC-20...
> and I wonder if I'd have ever given a damn about the field if my first
> exposure to computers involved a Modern User Experience.

I haven't stopped to wonder exactly that, but I think I would have hated them. I was brought up on the idea that computers existed to be programmed, so I wasn't happy when Windows shipped without a programming language outside the DOS prompt, or later at all. I might have gone hunting for "a real computer"! :) It also took me years to get used to the mouse, and longer to get used to menus. It probably didn't help that I didn't have a decent desk for my first Atari ST, and GEM is *terrible!* Anyway, I love this quote:

> Then I discovered girls and cars and didn't get back into computers until the early 90s only to discover that there was no longer a computer that was READY> in 1.2 seconds and would only do exactly what it was told exactly when it was told as fast as it could...Nope, by then the spinning hourglass had been invented and the world has been riveted to their not-as-big-as-a-tv screen, the scowl lines of struggle on their foreheads, one hand tied to a mouse, the other fingers tapping...but conflict obviously was what America needed [...]

It's in the comments here:
https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/collection/atari-400.htm

That 1.2 seconds was the time it took an Atari 400 to check for a disk drive. Windows 7 takes about 50 times as long to 'install' a USB keyboard! It's not even like Atari's peripheral bus was overly simple; it supported almost all peripherals with a common protocol, so I think of it as an early USB.

--
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne. -- Chaucer

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Skip Tavakkolian]

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One of the first systems that I could actually touch was a 68K/S100 system
back in early '80s; it ran a unix-like OS.  It was made by a Seattle area
company named Empirical Research Group.  The CPU board had Forth in ROM. I
was lucky enough to witness one of the designers perform some serious
diagnostics on other boards in the system using only the CPU/Forth.

I don't think they were the first to come up with this idea.

On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 10:39 PM Kurt H Maier <khm@sciops.net> wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 10:35:42PM +0100, Ethan A. Gardener wrote:
> >
> > a sort of operating system where the primary interface to all tasks is
> > a Forth interpreter.
>
> I think we've talked about this in another venue some years back, but I
> often thing of the OpenFirmware implementation used by the OLPC XO-1
> laptop.  Instead of a BIOS or UEFI or linux trash in their stead, the
> system was managed by an OpenFirmware installation, much of which was
> written in Forth, and whose primary interface was a Forth shell.  This
> environment had complete access to the hardware of the system, which
> was used by the project to create really comprehensive hardware
> diagnostics tools.
>
> I mostly used it for screwing around, but it was fairly complete; it
> supported the wifi hardware and the webcam, and I often thought I'd like
> a computer that just booted into this environment and stayed there.  I'm
> glad to hear you're still experimenting along these lines.  There's a
> lot of value in a system whose primary interface is the programming
> environment.  I work with computers because of the Commodore VIC-20...
> and I wonder if I'd have ever given a damn about the field if my first
> exposure to computers involved a Modern User Experience.
>
> khM
>
>

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Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Richard Miller]

> a sort of operating system where the primary interface to all tasks is
> a Forth interpreter.

The next step beyond eliminating the OS and running forth on bare metal
is to eliminate the (conventional) CPU and build a forth processor on
a FPGA.  See for example http://www.excamera.com/sphinx/fpga-j1.html

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Iruatã Souza]

On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 10:39 PM, Kurt H Maier <khm@sciops.net> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 10:35:42PM +0100, Ethan A. Gardener wrote:
>>
>> a sort of operating system where the primary interface to all tasks is
>> a Forth interpreter.
>
> I think we've talked about this in another venue some years back, but I
> often thing of the OpenFirmware implementation used by the OLPC XO-1
> laptop.  Instead of a BIOS or UEFI or linux trash in their stead, the
> system was managed by an OpenFirmware installation, much of which was
> written in Forth, and whose primary interface was a Forth shell.  This
> environment had complete access to the hardware of the system, which
> was used by the project to create really comprehensive hardware
> diagnostics tools.
>

Kurt and Ethan,

I am sure you know that, but Forth has basically started as an
language + operating system and stayed there for quite some time.
Forth hosted on other operating systems is the (not so) new thing.

For a "recent" instance of Forth language+os for the pc, check Andy
Valencia's ForthOS.

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Tyga]

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Talking of Forth,  it is worthwhile to note that Postscript as implemented
by Adobe for laser printers and subsequently for photo-typesetters, etc is
a very good example of Forth-like system running on bare metal and
providing an application specific programming + operating environment.

Years ago, Byte magazine published an excellent book "Threaded Interpreted
Languages" (TIL) which contains lots of good information, including details
of how to roll your own using the Z80 (yes, the book is that old).

On 27 June 2018 at 15:18, Iruatã Souza <iru.muzgo@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 10:39 PM, Kurt H Maier <khm@sciops.net> wrote:
> > On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 10:35:42PM +0100, Ethan A. Gardener wrote:
> >>
> >> a sort of operating system where the primary interface to all tasks is
> >> a Forth interpreter.
> >
> > I think we've talked about this in another venue some years back, but I
> > often thing of the OpenFirmware implementation used by the OLPC XO-1
> > laptop.  Instead of a BIOS or UEFI or linux trash in their stead, the
> > system was managed by an OpenFirmware installation, much of which was
> > written in Forth, and whose primary interface was a Forth shell.  This
> > environment had complete access to the hardware of the system, which
> > was used by the project to create really comprehensive hardware
> > diagnostics tools.
> >
>
> Kurt and Ethan,
>
> I am sure you know that, but Forth has basically started as an
> language + operating system and stayed there for quite some time.
> Forth hosted on other operating systems is the (not so) new thing.
>
> For a "recent" instance of Forth language+os for the pc, check Andy
> Valencia's ForthOS.
>
>

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Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Mart Zirnask]

On 21/06/2018, Ethan A. Gardener <eekee57@fastmail.fm> wrote:
>... I no longer have a desk of
> the right proportions to make mouse use comfortable, and can no longer bend
> over a laptop for hours on end, (a Thinkpad with 3 buttons,) text editing in
> Plan 9 has become unpleasant. I could patch Samterm and Rio to make it more
> comfortable, but it's not worth it.

Would you mind elaborating on these ideas?

Something I've been thinking along the same lines:
Inferno's shell allows one to add custom buttons to a shell window.
See more here:
http://debu.gs/entries/interlude-inferno-at-work

This could be used to add shortcuts to common/more complicated text
editing tasks in Inferno's sh + sam -d.
I'm not sure if this would free one from using a 3-button mouse, though.

Mart

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Ethan A. Gardener]

On Thu, Jun 21, 2018, at 8:20 AM, Mart Zirnask wrote:
> On 21/06/2018, Ethan A. Gardener <eekee57@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> >... I no longer have a desk of
> > the right proportions to make mouse use comfortable, and can no longer bend
> > over a laptop for hours on end, (a Thinkpad with 3 buttons,) text editing in
> > Plan 9 has become unpleasant. I could patch Samterm and Rio to make it more
> > comfortable, but it's not worth it.
> 
> Would you mind elaborating on these ideas?

Not at all. The first thing I would do is make it so Samterm keeps Sam's snarf buffer in sync with Rio's. I know it's sometimes useful to have the two separate buffers, but I so often want to copy between the editor and other windows that for me, it's an immense pain. An alternate, possibly better idea would be to add commands to Sam, equivalent to >cat>/dev/snarf and <cat</dev/snarf . I've only just thought of those commands, I think I'd try to implement them first, because synchronizing the snarf buffers is not entirely straightforward (if I remember right,) and menus...

Menus! Grarrr I hate you, go away! Not entirely, I like them when they remind me of stuff, but every time I use one I have to Stop. And. Look. At. It. Not wonderful when wanting to get on with the job, or to not lose my focus. It matters less now I'm trying to relax, but I have experienced pie menus and found them a brilliant solution to exactly this problem, up to a point. 

I would not want to jam window lists (Sam's or Rio's) into an infinite series of pie menus because, speaking from experience, nesting pie menus beyond two levels more than negates the benefits. Given that I'd normally have pie menus with 8 elements, for the button-3 menus of both programs I'd have 5 elements in a semi-circle attached to the side of a normal vertical menu containing the window list. (It would have to warp the pointer so it comes up in the center of the pie (or half-pie), there's no point making a pie if it doesn't do that.)

I'd also add ctrl-x/c/v, and perhaps a prefix key to enter control codes. (I guess alt-x nnnn works already, but I know the keys.) 

I think that's all my actual requirements for making Sam comfortable. It's window management is a little fussy, but it doesn't annoy me the way Acme's can. Acme makes assumptions about workflow which are only rarely valid in my usage, and I can't see how to improve it without scrapping its entire window system premise, and starting again. Sam might be improved with a simple paned arrangement, but not like acme in that the panes are relatively fixed. Still, I prefer overlapping windows on a small screen, despite the extra fuss of managing them. With the way my eyesight is going, that might soon be any screen. (That reminds me, I never did get around to porting ESpeak to Plan 9. It's supposedly C++, but IIRC the only actual C++ was in the RiscOS-specific parts. I remember very C-like code, anyway.)

Almost forgot: I also had an idea for a second control window for Sam. The idea is that you enter commands into it, but they're not executed immediately. Instead, when you button-2 click, the entire line is executed. In Acme, I found myself frequently re-using commands. This would make that easy in Sam too -- or easier, rather. You can already snarf and send, but snarfing isn't so quick -- see above. 9front added chording to Samterm, but it's not reliable when I use it; needs a bit of fixing. 


Speaking of menus reminding me of stuff, sometimes I lc /bin/games to remind me what games exist, which was my primary use for a launcher menu in Linux. I don't play many of them often. I like Plan 9's hierarchical /bin. It's a shame it's not very simple to union mount more than one level in Plan 9.

> 
> Something I've been thinking along the same lines:
> Inferno's shell allows one to add custom buttons to a shell window.
> See more here:
> http://debu.gs/entries/interlude-inferno-at-work

A fun idea. :) Acme is similarly flexible, of course, and my Forth junk definitely will be. 

Remarking on parts of that article:

"After that, starting up Inferno and hitting command-F (to run Inferno full-screen) makes the Mac look like an Inferno terminal. Perfect! I can lie to myself about what’s actually running on the computer."
This is what I did with my Mac. :) I don't hate its native interface but it is a bit dumb. Before I ever started using Plan 9 on it, I tried Linux but it was more hassle than necessary, and some hardware didn't work. I put OS X back on, (10.4, one of the best versions,) used its control panel, wifi setup, and nothing else except the X server full-screen. It was the best of both worlds, I loved it! :) Later, I variously ran Inferno, P9P Acme, and drawterm full-screen, usually with an external mouse. (It doesn't do multi-touch.) 

> 
> This could be used to add shortcuts to common/more complicated text
> editing tasks in Inferno's sh + sam -d.
> I'm not sure if this would free one from using a 3-button mouse, though.

Didn't someone praise modern trackpads in this thread? In the dim and distant past, (at least a whole year ago,) I recall a multitouch patch appearing for P9P. I think it entirely eliminated the need for a 3-button mouse. I'm sure it could be reasonably applied to Inferno, and to Drawterm if it hasn't already.

-- 
I regret nothing except my new-found capitalization policies.

Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[刘宇宝]

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> I'd also add ctrl-x/c/v, and perhaps a prefix key to enter control codes.

> (I guess alt-x nnnn works already, but I know the keys.)

Some days ago I wanted to input "\r" in Rio term window, spent about half an hour to figure out what the prefix key was, or some special syntax in rc,  finally I gave up,  used "Ctrl-m" instead.

Regards,
Yubao Liu

________________________________
From: 9fans-bounces@9fans.net <9fans-bounces@9fans.net> on behalf of Ethan A. Gardener <eekee57@fastmail.fm>
Sent: Thursday, June 21, 2018 11:11 PM
To: 9fans@9fans.net
Subject: Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

On Thu, Jun 21, 2018, at 8:20 AM, Mart Zirnask wrote:
> On 21/06/2018, Ethan A. Gardener <eekee57@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> >... I no longer have a desk of
> > the right proportions to make mouse use comfortable, and can no longer bend
> > over a laptop for hours on end, (a Thinkpad with 3 buttons,) text editing in
> > Plan 9 has become unpleasant. I could patch Samterm and Rio to make it more
> > comfortable, but it's not worth it.
>
> Would you mind elaborating on these ideas?

Not at all. The first thing I would do is make it so Samterm keeps Sam's snarf buffer in sync with Rio's. I know it's sometimes useful to have the two separate buffers, but I so often want to copy between the editor and other windows that for me, it's an immense pain. An alternate, possibly better idea would be to add commands to Sam, equivalent to >cat>/dev/snarf and <cat</dev/snarf . I've only just thought of those commands, I think I'd try to implement them first, because synchronizing the snarf buffers is not entirely straightforward (if I remember right,) and menus...

Menus! Grarrr I hate you, go away! Not entirely, I like them when they remind me of stuff, but every time I use one I have to Stop. And. Look. At. It. Not wonderful when wanting to get on with the job, or to not lose my focus. It matters less now I'm trying to relax, but I have experienced pie menus and found them a brilliant solution to exactly this problem, up to a point.

I would not want to jam window lists (Sam's or Rio's) into an infinite series of pie menus because, speaking from experience, nesting pie menus beyond two levels more than negates the benefits. Given that I'd normally have pie menus with 8 elements, for the button-3 menus of both programs I'd have 5 elements in a semi-circle attached to the side of a normal vertical menu containing the window list. (It would have to warp the pointer so it comes up in the center of the pie (or half-pie), there's no point making a pie if it doesn't do that.)

I'd also add ctrl-x/c/v, and perhaps a prefix key to enter control codes. (I guess alt-x nnnn works already, but I know the keys.)

I think that's all my actual requirements for making Sam comfortable. It's window management is a little fussy, but it doesn't annoy me the way Acme's can. Acme makes assumptions about workflow which are only rarely valid in my usage, and I can't see how to improve it without scrapping its entire window system premise, and starting again. Sam might be improved with a simple paned arrangement, but not like acme in that the panes are relatively fixed. Still, I prefer overlapping windows on a small screen, despite the extra fuss of managing them. With the way my eyesight is going, that might soon be any screen. (That reminds me, I never did get around to porting ESpeak to Plan 9. It's supposedly C++, but IIRC the only actual C++ was in the RiscOS-specific parts. I remember very C-like code, anyway.)

Almost forgot: I also had an idea for a second control window for Sam. The idea is that you enter commands into it, but they're not executed immediately. Instead, when you button-2 click, the entire line is executed. In Acme, I found myself frequently re-using commands. This would make that easy in Sam too -- or easier, rather. You can already snarf and send, but snarfing isn't so quick -- see above. 9front added chording to Samterm, but it's not reliable when I use it; needs a bit of fixing.


Speaking of menus reminding me of stuff, sometimes I lc /bin/games to remind me what games exist, which was my primary use for a launcher menu in Linux. I don't play many of them often. I like Plan 9's hierarchical /bin. It's a shame it's not very simple to union mount more than one level in Plan 9.

>
> Something I've been thinking along the same lines:
> Inferno's shell allows one to add custom buttons to a shell window.
> See more here:
> http://debu.gs/entries/interlude-inferno-at-work

A fun idea. :) Acme is similarly flexible, of course, and my Forth junk definitely will be.

Remarking on parts of that article:

"After that, starting up Inferno and hitting command-F (to run Inferno full-screen) makes the Mac look like an Inferno terminal. Perfect! I can lie to myself about what’s actually running on the computer."
This is what I did with my Mac. :) I don't hate its native interface but it is a bit dumb. Before I ever started using Plan 9 on it, I tried Linux but it was more hassle than necessary, and some hardware didn't work. I put OS X back on, (10.4, one of the best versions,) used its control panel, wifi setup, and nothing else except the X server full-screen. It was the best of both worlds, I loved it! :) Later, I variously ran Inferno, P9P Acme, and drawterm full-screen, usually with an external mouse. (It doesn't do multi-touch.)

>
> This could be used to add shortcuts to common/more complicated text
> editing tasks in Inferno's sh + sam -d.
> I'm not sure if this would free one from using a 3-button mouse, though.

Didn't someone praise modern trackpads in this thread? In the dim and distant past, (at least a whole year ago,) I recall a multitouch patch appearing for P9P. I think it entirely eliminated the need for a 3-button mouse. I'm sure it could be reasonably applied to Inferno, and to Drawterm if it hasn't already.

--
I regret nothing except my new-found capitalization policies.


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