csant/log

I want more Plan 9 users. It's a great kernel, but it's going to continue to fall behind if we don't get more people on it.

Recently a long thread on the 9fans mailing list touched several important questions about Plan 9 and its use, and boiled down to: what does plan 9 do better that people actually care about?

I do not want to sum up the long and interesting thread, but a few points raised seem worth to be isolated.

Desktop environment

Plan 9 offers a very interesting desktop environment with an extremely innovative user interface, maybe best described by Ron in a post to the thread:

linux nowadays is all about building a windows desktop. BORING. Or a Mac OSX ripoff desktop. BORING. And just look at all that great vista stuff. oh boy, I can slant my windows or something. Who the F*** cares?

What if you had a window manager that could be recursive? that would set it up so you can name windows by a path name? that would let you treat the recursive desktops -- to any level -- as just another window? that would trivially allow you to connect mouse clicks in a window to control actions for one or more other windows (i.e. you could logically group windows and then control all of them via mouse clicks)? That would maybe let you easily connect output from a process in one window to another? that would let you build little widgets that could easily control other windows? That would let you display all window state in another window? That would let you set, say, all windows with a browser with the label abaco-### (### a number), with a simple text command; and let you find all windows with the label abaco.* with, in the limit, a grep? That would make it easy to group all windows with the label 'abaco.*' so that you could say 'hide all abaco' with a simple script?

Wouldn't that be neat? I mean, that's a real bitch in X, right?

Except ... you already have it.

The user input is not as clearly separated into mouse vs. keyboard, as it is in the UNIX world - but it presents a very interesting combination of both. Mouse and keyboard interaction are combined in a rather uncommon way, complementing each other. After an initial period necessary to getting used to it, I find it to be one of the most well-working UIs - I rarely came across moments when it wouldn't *do what I mean*.

Plan 9 is not UNIX. Plan 9 is spartan and lean, and also very effective, and "quieter" than Linux. A full Plan 9 desktop has less OS noise than a Linux box at the login prompt. This matters. It seems to have the basis for an interesting and appealing desktop operating system, but it lacks users - and killer applications to attract new users. The recent effort to get v9fs into the mainline Linux kernel, as well as a project to port gcc 4.1 to Plan 9 could be the first steps to convince some people that Plan9 (kernel) is a useful alternative to Linux without asking them to rewrite all their applications.