What's the curses equivalent?
For what it's worth, anything that does more than just print to stdout breaks in 9term.
For what it's worth, anything that does more than just print to stdout breaks in 9term.
Another thing that get conflated with text interfaces is keyboard control. For whatever reason the plan 9 developers were very adverse to this and preferred mouse based interaction.
Anyway plan 9 is interesting because of how it's different. If you're approaching it asking "Where's emacs and vim?" or "Why can't I get my shell history by pressing up?" you're probably not getting the full value out of it. Part of the problem is probably that it's close enough to unix to make people put unix expectations on it.
Here's a video about acme, a programmer's interface for plan 9.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4533156
Check out these man pages. http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/2/window http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/2/graphics http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/2/draw
Your comment of it seeming like Unix might be the key point to take away. I know that I'm supposed to search in the buffer for history and use the mouse to select and rerun it, but having tried it multiple times, I cannot get comfortable with a mutable terminal buffer. That's also why in Emacs I only use term and not the editable terminals. Maybe one day I'll get comfortable.
Again, the vt terminal emulator is available if you want vim over ssh.