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Comment by totallywrong | Hacker News Reader

Never tried but I remember reading it was very dependent on the mouse. I probably wouldn't like it.

It is, but for what it's worth using the mouse is much more pleasant than what we're used to ime. It's weird at first, especially with the teleporting thing but it works really well.

Also, if you're gonna try it do it either with a proper three-button mouse or with a large-ish and easy to press scroll wheel button. Otherwise it's really frustrating.

Just the idea of context switching from mouse to keyboard is so annoying to me outside of graphic editing. I installed vinium for firefox recently and it has been a game changer.

That's fair and I share the sentiment to some degree, especially in "regular" systems. In the time period I used plan 9 I quickly got used to it though, and the method of interaction made me a bit slower and much more considerate. I liked it a lot. I still miss it. I'll probably try it again some time.

Context switch??

After longer usage you do that without any thinking

Ish. Just changing where you are oriented can impact how some people are thinking. By nature of their orientation.

Moving to a mouse primes my brain to start thinking spatially about things. Which is not something I'm typically doing when looking at textual/symbolic things. I can see some value in doing it, of course.

One problem I had is that I often just messed up the buttons, especially in the chords, and there's not a whole lot of feedback. I also messed up some things like letting go of the mouse button too soon by accident. Granted, I never spent that long with it, but it's not very mnemonic and requires some amount of motor skills I don't seem to have (e.g. in Vim "dw" is mnemonic for "delete word" and you get more feedback).

Plan 9 in general seems very much like a system "by the designers, for its designers" with not all that much attention to user-friendliness. To some degree that's also the case for Unix, but with Unix other people took the thing they made at Bell Labs and made it somewhat user-friendly (and even then, its received plenty of criticism for it). In Plan9 that step never really happened.

I learned the chords very quickly, but everyone works differently. What kind of feedback exactly would you expect from it? I can't immediately think of anything that would make it much better. I guess animations could help, but then they might just be distracting.

I think the main thing people get confused by besides the chording is the teleporting of the cursor, but then you realize it's actually really useful once you get used to it (at least I did).

> What kind of feedback exactly would you expect from it?

I don't know exactly; this is one of those things where I'd have to implement some things and play around to see what works. Something like some text popping up maybe? I don't know. More advanced users can always just disable these sort of things (I also set up my Vim to not show "-- INSERT --" because at this point it's never helpful for me and it looks a bit nicer this way, but obviously for loads of people it's a very helpful thing).

Fair enough.

A cursor change on the beginning of the chord would be the most obvious feedback. Maybe something like [1-] over the cursor, showing up the pressed key?

>Plan 9 in general seems very much like a system "by the designers, for its designers"

It definitely is that. That's a really great thing when the designers needs and assumptions match your own, but if they don't, you end up wondering what these bozos were thinking.

For what it's worth, Rob Pike was a big proponent of the mouse-driven design, and he has some very thoughtful essays/articles/emails about why he feels that way. I can't say I agree with him 100%, but it's clear that the decisions weren't arbitrary.

Yes, Plan 9 made some bad choices in retrospect, at least in my opinion. The big dependency on the mouse is one of them but also assuming people will be in managed networks.

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