Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThomPete | Hacker News Reader

As an interface designer Plan9 have always fascinated me yet I found it incredible hard to find many other designers who were into it's concepts.

I always loved the "everything is an object" approach and in a better world this not NeXT or Windows would be our underlying principle.

View on HN

You may be interested in wmii [1], a tiling WM which is inspired by Plan 9 and uses 9P.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wmii

I love wmii. It's the primary reason I resent OS X.

> I love wmii. It's the primary reason I resent OS X.

Huh? What's the relationship?

Presumably the fact that you're tied into using Apple's window manager. But that's really loose and I don't totally understand why it merited being mentioned either, haha.

OSX fundamentally doesn't support robust tiling window managers. they exist only as a pale shadow of the real thing.

Isn't that the same case as Windows, BeOS, Android, iOS, PalmOS, etc?... I was wondering why OSX was explicitly called out.

OSX has a larger userbase of Plan9 fans, I think, including a number who run plan9port on it (Rob Pike has said that he uses such a setup). So the bits that you can't get Plan9-ish might rankle someone. Windows isn't any better, but there aren't many people trying to make Windows feel anything like Plan9 in the first place, so nobody's too disappointed about it.

Moom is pretty handy, though.

You can run any linux window manager directly on os x... of course you're stuck running only *nix programs then

True, but Amethyst[0] comes pretty close for my personal taste.

[0] https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst

Presumably it's a sort of sideways/backhanded almost-compliment to OS X: it works well enough comparatively that its plusses overwhelm its negatives for the commenter. But, they still wish it supported more flexibility; and the fact it doesn't (and yet its plusses nevertheless still compare favorably enough to its minuses that the commenter continues to use it) leads to a sort of feeling of dissatisfaction and resentment.

Yes, exactly. I mostly love OS X in that it gives me nearly everything I love about Linux with almost none of the hassle. The window management story is terrible though. Wmii really clicked for me, and OS X really pales in comparison on that front.

Very interesting thank you!

Interestingly, i3wm is designed as a successor to wmii and explicitly decided to avoid the Plan 9 aspect. [1]

Does someone have examples of cool things you can do in wmii thanks to this?

[1] Google Tech Talk about i3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnYN2CTb1hM (this question at 15:30)

> I always loved the "everything is an object" approach

Which sadly isn't at all what Plan9 does, in the usual "worse is better" way of Unix. Objects would allow a bit more versatility than the "everything is a file, usually one with plain UTF-8 text" approach. (And actually, Windows is closer to an object world with COM, as evidenced by e.g. the core model of PowerShell)

Of course, an object-model has a hard time when the rest of the world and the net is talking in files, you're also much more likely to create a walled garden.

As for simplicity, I can understand that regarding systems like Smalltalk (or possibly lisp machines), although Oberon serves as a prime counter-example here. It did inspire the Acme editor, and here you can see that if your basic text model is objects, not just a byte-stream, some extensions are easier to do (different fonts, syntax highlighting, widgets).

And yes, I'm aware that the usual response to that was and is "you don't need that". Milages obviously do vary.

OS/2 Presentation Manager and SOM tried it.

Oberon also had quite nice concepts, specially version 3 with Gadgets.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com