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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Also: HURD? You're funny.

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