Happy to see this getting updated, although it is bittersweet to realize it has a minuscule user base and that the UX will likely never change (the three-button mouse UX simply isn’t a good fit for today’s laptops).
However, the window management feels rather cumbersome and not offering decent keyboard navigation and shortcuts as a complement to chording is, to me, the single most annoying "feature", laptop or not.
I'm sure this could be implemented using keystrokes as well and the source code is of course available. However, I doubt such a change would be accepted upstream. You could say it's a central point in the "Plan 9 philosophy".
You could also read the process memory directly by a supervisory program, like a debugger, to extract or insert text directly. It would be like idea implantation.
Does that make sense?
Side note: Inserting text using a debugger shouldn't be necessary. Everything really is a file, including Acme's windows and their contents (which is pretty cool).
Then you could send it a message
GET /text_repr?encoding=jsonI don't think the mouse chording is that essential to Plan 9. It's how rio and acme work, but those programs can be replaced without throwing away most of the OS concepts. I think you could absolutely create a Plan 9 UI that, for example, uses vi-like key bindings to jump around windows and text. Nobody's just done it yet and hardcore users are happy enough with what they have for now.
I have a play with Inferno in a VM some years ago. (I can't even find an ISO of it now, which is something that needs fixing badly, alongside a ready-to-run version for Linux on x86-64.)
Oberon, and thus Plan 9, spring directly from the era of the original Xerox PARC Alto. Their design comes from before Apple standardised the GUI in the early 1980s, with standardised menu bars, standard window controls in the title bar, the idea of dialog boxes, plus ones that have standard buttons in standard places.
(You know -- all the sort of stuff GNOME is busily removing again now.)
Microsoft mimicked this design in Windows 1 and 2, DR aped it in GEM, IBM in OS/2 1.x, etc. All later GUIs are informed by LisaOS and MacOS 1.
Oberon was before that and it has none of that stuff. Plan 9 loosely mimics Oberon and so it doesn't, either.
Result: it's very weird if all you know are post-1990s GUIs.
Inferno modernised the Plan 9 UI and it's quite usable by comparison. But Inferno is even more obscure than Plan 9.
FWIW, The A2 OS modernised Oberon and it's much more usable, too. Both are still weird but they're vaguely recognisable and you can just start clicking on stuff.
The usual program for it is http://man.9front.org/1/riow
Ktrans also uses it: http://man.9front.org/1/ktrans
As an X11 user, I think that select/single button paste is one of the better features of the platform. I miss it terribly when on windows.
Believe me, when I say Plan9/9front/rio has a crap UX on laptops, it isn't due to lack of trying. Even when I ran an Plan9 "terminal" on a Pi with a three-button mouse, the UX was bad.
As a compulsive text-highlighter, I've always found it useless. Between that and not being able to copy-and-replace with it, I'd say I've used it by accident at least as often as I've used it on purpose. And I've been using X-window systems since before 3-button (no scrollwheel) mice went all-but extinct, so I should have been able to get used to it if I was ever going to.
Imagine if every time you hit ctrl+c or ctrl+v a dialog opened up asking if you are sure you want to copy or paste. a bit annoying, breaks your train of thought, and doubles your keypresses.
That is what it feels like to go from x11 to windows.
Of course, nothing's worse than the weirdos who like trackballs.
Maybe you just have the wrong laptops ;)
Speak for yourself...
Patches welcome.