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Comment by noobermin | Hacker News Reader

The 9front people have always been a funny bunch. I've always wanted to use plan9 tools seriously partially because of their websites and docs are so amusing but I never could get past just running it in a vm.

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Acme is genuinely worth trying, you can run it on Linux/Mac without a VM [1]. I'm pretty sure Russ Cox [2] and Rob Pike use it as their daily driver which is insane because it doesn't even have syntax highlighting. I used it for years when I was in school as an exercise in masochism, but I learned a lot about Unix, and the mouse-driven workflow actually grew on me. I hated that it required a 3-button mouse though, made trackpads basically unusable.

[1]: https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/

[2]: https://usesthis.com/interviews/russ.cox/

Macbook trackpads work fine combined with control/option/command as three buttons. I put the metal screen for devdraw together initially.

It should work similarly on X11, though I never tried.

That's not an accident, Rob Pike famously hates syntax highlighting, he's derided it as "childish" on multiple occasions.

Wow, that reeks of arrogance.

I don't think Pike ever gets accused of arrogance being off brand for him.

More than "made by people who avoid browsers" does?

Netsurf works fine under 9front.

I don't doubt there are browsers available, I was quoting from/commenting on something in the link.

I'm not that far behind him but on the basis that syntax highlighting is sometimes completely wrong. That leads to a lot of head scratching when it turns out the highlighting engine is wrong and the code is not. Of course this is because a lot of the engines use naive regex to do the highlighting rather than a parser.

Calling it childish is a little wrong though for sure.

it reeks of Rob Pike ;)

The guy built a programming language in the 2010's by ignoring everything that happened in the computer science community since his heyday, and tried to spin it as an improvement.

The ways people found to circumvent his hubris are pretty entertaining [1].

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5penft/parallelizing_...

Your comment it's utterly wrong.

Go's backstory dates back to Alef/Inferno and Plan9, and tangentally related to Plan9's C compiler suite.

If any, Go was born to replace C/POSIX and all the bloat which grew up over 40, (forty) years. The same with 9front with Unix, which is closer to the Unix philosophy than any close relative, such as OpenBSD. Everything it's a file under 9front, even the windows themselves.

Rust wants to replace C++ mainly.

Go was born to replace C/POSIX → by ignoring everything that happened in the computer science community since [its] heyday

You have to admit that quoting 1 Corinthians in an argument about text editors is pretty funny.

Let me guess: 1 Cor 13:11?

I can't not quote that in a Cereal Killer voice now.

Angry fruit salad

> Acme is genuinely worth trying,

What makes it better than say vi and not just different?

Its take on how to use the mouse is quite unique. Not for everyone but worth trying.

Different can be better or worse depending on the user. What makes Vim better than emacs and not just different?

I think that expression was that poster’s way of asking what are Acme’s unique but _useful_ features.

It can also update your certificates.

So name broken links in the uses this.com interview

... pardon?

I think they mean "Some broken links in the usesthis.com interview". Some of the commercial product links are broken, which is hardly surprising in an interview from 2011 about technology.

Just installed it. Any tips for what the interesting features are? The one that stood out from the video linked to in another comment was running any selected text as commands.

I still use Acme as my daily driver, with a good smattering of Sam on my vertical monitor for various things. About 90% of my scripts are written in rc or use the tools in $PLAN9/bin (awk, sed, seq, etc.)

It gives me good consistency between Mac and Linux (or WSL), so I highly recommend plan9port as a gateway to plan9 and 9front.

Sexy time videos from the maintainers might just be what gets me to switch my daily driver to plan9!

I've always felt that Linus didn't show enough skin.

It runs well natively; but for older systems, I'd suggest running this first once you get an internet connection before inst/start:

    % webfs
    % ramfs
    % hget http://plan9.stanleylieber.com/rc/mountcwfs >/tmp/mountcwfs
    % chmod +x /tmp/mountcwfs
    % bind /tmp/mountcwfs /bin/inst/mountcwfs

Then, at preppart:

     > d other
     > d fscache
     > d fsworm
     > a fsmain [first free cylinder] .+100%
     > w
     > q

I wonder what the original plan9 designers ken thompson, robe pike etc think of the 9front people.

Maybe find them amusing - or happy to see their creation being pushed forward

Could always just try Inferno

That hasn't seen so much as even a patch in years

Yeah but it is fire.

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