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Comment by pekk | Hacker News Reader

It should not be too hard for people to write utilities to fortify what Plan9 offers, if they know what to write. But it's a chicken-egg problem to write utilities if nobody uses the platform. Is it a dead cause?

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Converting many of the tools used by the Unix hackerdom is made rather difficult by two aspects:

* Plan 9's approach on terminal is entirely decoupled from the TTY idea. The terminal is basically a program that takes commands, has a shell run them, and pipes back the result, with none of the VT-whatever stuff. Even getting ncurses-based tools to run would require some effort.

* There's no X11

There are some graphical tools for Plan 9 (including more or less barebones web browsers), but there is just enough difference from Linux and BSD environments that people aren't quite willing to cope with it.

This is an x11 port in the contrib directory equis - if you want it. I use it to communicate with remote linux machines.

There is also an ncurses port and a vim port. I don't feel the need for either of those.

Good point. I sort of lost contact with the Plan 9 world a while ago -- I kept following the news, but no longer ran a system. Last time I used it, the X11 port was somewhere between experimental and broken, and vim is, uhm, not the editor whose port I'd be interested in :-). My comment is certainly not up-to-date.

Edit: I share your point about the lack of need for either ncurses or vim (especially vim, hheheh). My first contact with Plan 9 was somewhat disappointing, mainly due to the fact that I approached it with the oh, Unix, I know this! frame of mind. I was very much a Linux fanboy back then (did I mention it was in highschool? And this is not the dumbest thing I did in highschool!). Only after I studied the source code a little, and learned rc more seriously, did I really begin to appreciate it.

vim or emacs, gcc, and bash or zsh would be a good start.

I'd love to use, learn more about, and improve Plan9, but the lack of the above make it pretty painful.

This is why Hurd is probably far more likely to gain traction in the foreseeable future than Plan9.

I was able to find a vi-like editor for Inferno, fwiw. I think the issue is more a lack of updated language runtimes.

None of which are likely to happen, I'd point out, because vim, emacs, bash and zsh are all tied into some sort of notion of a virtual terminal with software controlled cursors, etc etc etc. Plan 9's TTY is astoundingly primitive by those standards; essentially it emulates a line printer but doesn't even have the good grace to allow backspacing. Oddly, said terminal exposes the contents of the scrollback buffer—both read and write—to a file, which is how the native Plan 9 history mechanisms work. This is entirely deliberate, of course, and a substantial part of what makes the system so different and interesting, but step #1 to porting those would involve reinventing xterm, basically.

In theory for vim and emacs you could work around that by using the graphical interface, much as say Acme does. I would estimate this to be at least as much work as porting from X11 to, say, Cocoa was, and possibly even worse. And this port would only get you a vim or an emacs that was materially identical to its Unix counterpart—no Acme style control FS and essentially no cooperation with the normal Plan 9 UI elements.

Plan9 can probably gain traction in something completely different than workstations or even servers, more like embedded or highly specialized devices. Just like a lot of people say, often one needs single killer app.

That's quite a load of legacy baggage. If your first reaction to a new system is "how do I get my old environment?", you may be missing the point. You need two shells, two editors, and a specific (gigantic!) compiler?

There's a vi for Plan 9 (even skipping the old joke about the MIPS interpreter...). I think it's vim, but I haven't paid much attention. David Hogan did a gcc port, and mostly nobody cared so it languished.

Also: HURD? You're funny.

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