What does HackerNews think of plan9port?

Ask HN: What's the next evolution of the GUI OS? | Oct 2022

Have you played with Plan9 the operating system and its windowing system?

or at least the Acme editor, which is also available for Mac and various Unix systems like Linux, FreeBSD etc.

Oberon, Plan 9 and Inferno (2021) | Sep 2022

I've done a little bit of C programming with the c libraries supplied by plan9port. It takes a bit of learning, but it's a very pleasant experience.

[1] https://github.com/9fans/plan9port

How I Switched to Plan 9 | Dec 2019

Plan 9 as a whole is a pretty good IDE for general development - excels at C, shell scripts, Go, and similar. Having been created explicitly to OS differs from older (POSIX/VMS era) OSes by making GUI, architecture portability, namespaces, user-level filesystems, software services, network transparency and distributed computing first-order concerns.

For those unable to switch outright, I wholeheartedly recommend plan9port[0] - an almost complete set of utilities and protocols from Plan 9, ported to run in Linux, MacOS X, and OpenBSD userspace. It's being actively developed[1] by the 9fans community.

plan9port comes with both sam and acme[2] programmers' text editors.

[0] https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/

[1] https://github.com/9fans/plan9port

[2] https://youtu.be/dP1xVpMPn8M

Disabling ANSI color output | Feb 2018

I use 9term (from plan9port[0]) as my standard terminal emulator. It has no support for colours. Plan9port comes with a command, nobs, which strips ANSI colour from output. Setting PAGER=nobs and TERM=dumb takes care of a lot of the colour outputting.

9term also does not support a lot of other terminal features. Using it I’ve noticed that there are two kinds of terminal programs:

1. Programs that uses the terminal as a GUI.

2. Programs that can be composed with other programs.

I prefer a program in category 2, since I like scripting to automate my tasks.

[0]: https://github.com/9fans/plan9port

A Tour of Acme (2012) [video] | Aug 2017

For the interested Plan 9 from User Space/plan9port is presently maintained at https://github.com/9fans/plan9port

More acme info at http://acme.cat-v.org

Acme has a cousin, sam: http://sam.cat-v.org

Text Editor Performance Comparison | Mar 2017

I wonder how Acme[0][1], developed by Rob Pike for Plan 9 would compare. It feels fast and light, but I only ever use it for files lighter than a megabyte.

[0]: http://acme.cat-v.org/ [1]: https://github.com/9fans/plan9port

Extracting data from Wikipedia using curl, grep, cut and other bash commands | Aug 2016

Expand Context ↕

Makefiles are underrated. The concept is so simple – it is basically a dependency graph with attached shell scripts – yet so powerful. Not just for building software, but also for everyday tasks where you need some files to be updated under some condition.

I recommend mk (original make replacement for Plan 9, available for different OSes through Plan9Port [0,1]). It has a bit more uniform syntax, and can check that the dependency graph is wellfounded.

[0] https://github.com/9fans/plan9port

[1] https://swtch.com/plan9port/