Hacker News Reader

I'm fascinated by the expressiveness of the mouse in this demo. I've seen the mouse as a lost cause ever since committing to vim some time ago, but this video proves that I am wrong, very wrong. It's clear that the expressiveness of a UI is limited by it's designers not the hardware.

View on HN

Plan 9 in general reflects this ideology and concept. The entire operating uses the mouse very expressively to the point that when I develop outside of a mouse expressive UI it feels lacking. Among other things, the mouse chording used in Plan 9 is available almost everywhere in the OS. Ex. L+M=Cut, L+R=Paste

The cut and paste is an old Unix thing. It's not just plan9.

Yes. But the graphical UI interface he's talking about was lost with the advent of Xorg.

The same (or very close) interface was available for unix in 1982 with the Blit graphics terminal. Blit was created by Rob Pike (acme creator) too and it influenced the next Pike's GUIs (rio and 8½).

In Plan9's rio, windows are treated as completely editable text, then the mouse chords for cut-and-paste works for all applications transparently.

Blit promotional video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emh22gT5e9k

Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blit_(computer_terminal)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com