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Plan 9 from User Space

swtch.com

11 pointspmarin6 comments

I've installed and played around with p9p (Plan 9 Port, aka, Plan 9 from User Space) and 9vx, but never managed to get the text to render acceptably. (If any of you have seen the text in Emacs over X11 before the integration with GTK+ or whatever in Emacs 23, it was at least as bad as that.) I tried 2 third-party "softwares" (hacks on p9p) which aimed to do text smoothing, but no joy. I might have tried to get used to it, but I believe I would never be able to get used to switching back and forth many time per hour between p9p's or 9vx's text and the text in graphical browser on Linux, OS X or Windows.

In general, I do best when all the text I view during a session at the computer is rendered by a single system, like Aqua or Gnome/GTK. My visual system is defective (exotropia and "lazy eye") but not so much that I have any restrictions on my driver's license. I can read 12-point text on OS X (and probably 10-point text, too), but when a system can handle it without complicating my life, like Carbon Emacs 22 can, I prefer 18-point text, and part of the reason that I do is probably that there is more visual information per character. (I'm a little far-sighted, and my head is usually 4'-5' from the monitor.)

I think you have a bad setup. I've been using p9p for years as my main desktop and I know 10s of others that do the same.

try setting your font= variable in $home/lib/profile

You can also mail the dev mailing list and see if anyone can help you.

http://groups.google.com/group/plan9port-dev

Do you not get output like the screenshots ?

http://swtch.com/plan9port/screenshots/

I got output like the screenshots. In http://swtch.com/plan9port/screenshots/macosx1.png, the lack of smoothing is most noticeable in the forward slashes. I tried all the things you suggest except that I mailed 9fans, not plan9port-dev. Bad setup strikes me as extremely unlikely because I tried twice (p9p on Linux, then 9vx on OS X) and because the responses I got on 9fans were two hacks which add text smoothing to Plan 9. (The two hacks were unsatisfactory, as the characters had inconsistent spacing and artifacts surrounded the glyphs sometimes.)

Again, if all the text I look at during a session at the computer were rendered by Plan 9, I could probably get used to it (since I ran Linux in text mode for years, and the text mode on my video card had no smoothing unless I am very, very much mistaken), but that would be impractical because Plan 9 does not have a satisfactory graphical web browser. You're not going to contest that last statement, are you? Heck, even Russ Cox does not use Plan 9 for browsing the web.

My car doesn't have a stereo either.

Plan9 has three graphical web browsers but no, not CSS3 & JS. Russ doesn't even run a Plan9 terminal at all so he's not much of a benchmark.

If web browsing is what you use your computer for, then perhaps Plan9 is not for you.

Plan9 doesn't have anti-aliased fonts by default as it uses bitmap fonts. There are unofficial builds that use TTF fonts (I run one of those) and also some other NDA goodies. I think perhaps the TTF will migrate back into the main.

ESR had a nice overview of Plan 9 in his book "The Art of Unix Programming":

http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/plan9.html

  It may well be that over time, much more of Plan 9 will 
  work its way into Unix as various portions of Unix's 
  architecture slide into senescence.

(Still one of my favorite books on software development).

Seems an odd thing to drift into the list as it is quite mature software now, I berated Russ for doing it as I felt it diluted Plan9, I'm glad I was wrong and he didn't listen.

Once you learn rc shell you might find other shells to be bloated, verbose and whitespace fussy. The only complaint I've ever heard was job control, well that's because job contgrol is the kernel's job and it seems that when implementing /proc someone forgot the ctl file.

On Plan9 one does

    echo stop|start > /proc/$pidn/ctl

to stop or start a job

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