💾 Archived View for ulthar.cat › etc › plan9-text.gmi captured on 2022-03-01 at 19:22:20. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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2022-01-27 ~fel
the entire plan9 system centers around text manipulation, though the most notable is certainly acme. it is a mouse driven interface focused on executing external programs to modify its contents. i am quite a fan of it philosophically, but i just cant get used to going back and forth to a mouse, not sure if its just my setup but it hurts my wrist. too much fps gaming in prior maybe, i have to be careful.
since acme specializes in executing text, it can be composed to be quite interactive, allowing buttons and menus in a very transparent simple way. i have yet to find a program that uses a keyboard which compares in this aspect, sadly.
without even using acme, plan9s terminal does not implement vt100 sequences at all. doesnt even have readline-esque bindings, just a "dumb" output. this is made up for with its window managers, rio, ability to "swallow" child processes started from the terminal. this means that from the users perspective, assuming the interface of the program is simple, its just a rich text interface. this is probably the ideal imo and one of my favorite things in this realm from plan9, it makes the desktop workflow so much more fluent just with that single feature.
overall plan9 is focused on text interfaces, so just read about plan9 itself.