From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: Jonadab the Unsightly One Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii References: <20011105154852.0736919A08@mail.cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] Plan 9 Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2001 10:31:05 +0000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 15ec4860-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 presotto@closedmind.org writes: > The essence of rob's statement is that if you do nothing > to change it, Oh, system-level defaults. I see. Sorry for the confusion. > That said, the amount of configurability of the UI is much smaller > than X windows. Well, X is pretty baroque, in terms of configurability. (It can look almost like MacOS 8, or it can look astonishingly similar to Windows 98, or with Gnome it can look like an artist's misguided vision of what computers will look like in 2037, or...) I wouldn't expect every system to be quite that malleable. I do want simple things like the ability to change my colors around. BeOS, for example, annoys me because there's no global way to specify that I don't want blinding white backgrounds. Such a simple thing. > Having just spent 3 weeks trying to make 3 Linux systems look sort > of the same, Heh. Of course, you could just set them all to use twm... > I appreciate that less can be better. However, I was a minimalist > to start with and this certainly will grate on the people that like > to remap every key, command name, function, and window border. If > you do, Plan 9 isn't for you. I have most of the keys remapped in my editor, but that's because the defaults are so horrible. (I don't use Emacs for the default settings; I use it for the power.) I don't need to tweak quite so much in the OS, just enough to make it liveable -- basic things like I want a reasonable (i.e., not blinding) background colour, so I can stand to sit in front of the thing for more than a few minutes. Oh, and it's nice if I can get around the system mostly with the keyboard, with minimal need to drag the mouse all over creation. If the GUI is even half as customisable as Windows, that's probably enough for me.