Hacker News Reader

While the look certainly isn't flashy, I'd be fine with the look. It's the reliance on 3-button mice that's a problem for me. At least modern laptop touchpads can do middle mouse click with 3-fingers but that's a pretty lousy UX, so it's really only practical with a real mouse.

Also I'm much more of a keyboard + tiling window manager kind of a person, so the plan9 focus on the mouse isn't my cup of tea.

NeXTSTEP was never a “FreeBSD core”, at least not as is usually implied by that. It was XNU (Mach with FreeBSD’s world bolted on and IOKit shoveled in) with a custom Desktop Environment.

That's not a correct characterization. OS X is entirely NeXTStep with some classic Mac OS UI elements bolted into it. You couldn't just swap some bit out for Plan9.