Happy to see this getting updated, although it is bittersweet to realize it has a minuscule user base and that the UX will likely never change (the three-button mouse UX simply isn’t a good fit for today’s laptops).
I'd say the UI/UX actually isn't that good, period. "Everything is actually really a file this time", plumbing, acme and rio are all very cool and powerful concepts, as is the idea that we shouldn't have to care about silly old TTY intricacies and that the mouse should be a first class citizen in our tools.
However, the window management feels rather cumbersome and not offering decent keyboard navigation and shortcuts as a complement to chording is, to me, the single most annoying "feature", laptop or not.
Keyboard navigation is one of the features of this release. And it's fully scriptable via /dev/kbtap: you can write your own key bindings and compose them by piping the keyboard events through your scripts.
The Plan 9 UI is deeply arcane. It's heavily inspired by the Oberon UI, which itself is equally arcane, if not even more so.
I have a play with Inferno in a VM some years ago. (I can't even find an ISO of it now, which is something that needs fixing badly, alongside a ready-to-run version for Linux on x86-64.)
Oberon, and thus Plan 9, spring directly from the era of the original Xerox PARC Alto. Their design comes from before Apple standardised the GUI in the early 1980s, with standardised menu bars, standard window controls in the title bar, the idea of dialog boxes, plus ones that have standard buttons in standard places.
(You know -- all the sort of stuff GNOME is busily removing again now.)
Microsoft mimicked this design in Windows 1 and 2, DR aped it in GEM, IBM in OS/2 1.x, etc. All later GUIs are informed by LisaOS and MacOS 1.
Oberon was before that and it has none of that stuff. Plan 9 loosely mimics Oberon and so it doesn't, either.
Result: it's very weird if all you know are post-1990s GUIs.
Inferno modernised the Plan 9 UI and it's quite usable by comparison. But Inferno is even more obscure than Plan 9.
FWIW, The A2 OS modernised Oberon and it's much more usable, too. Both are still weird but they're vaguely recognisable and you can just start clicking on stuff.
Most importantly Inferno was meant to be a product while Plan 9 was a research system. A few things that were improved in Inferno were put back into Plan 9 3rd edition.
I'm not sure what an input router is, but the concept of mouse chording is absolutely an inherent property of Plan 9/9front and Acme. To the best of my knowledge you cannot mark, cut, copy or paste text at all using the keyboard. Copying is especially cumbersome and involves a three-button chord in conjunction with some precision pointing (first to mark the text, then to where you want it pasted).
I'm sure this could be implemented using keystrokes as well and the source code is of course available. However, I doubt such a change would be accepted upstream. You could say it's a central point in the "Plan 9 philosophy".
What if you had a OCR overlay that had a DOM like structure along with coordinates? You could hit a key combo, and then the text dom could float over the page and you could select nodes of it using your keyboard modifiers of choice (vim, emacs, etc).
You could also read the process memory directly by a supervisory program, like a debugger, to extract or insert text directly. It would be like idea implantation.
I don't think the mouse chording is that essential to Plan 9. It's how rio and acme work, but those programs can be replaced without throwing away most of the OS concepts. I think you could absolutely create a Plan 9 UI that, for example, uses vi-like key bindings to jump around windows and text. Nobody's just done it yet and hardcore users are happy enough with what they have for now.
I think it'd be easier to just implement better keyboard support in E.G. Acme and, to a lesser extent, the terminal. :)
Side note: Inserting text using a debugger shouldn't be necessary. Everything really is a file, including Acme's windows and their contents (which is pretty cool).
Ok, what if all the programs had an file, like a port, where it could read and write messages encoded in a high level dynamic language, maybe like Lua, or Arexx :) ?
With regard to laptop, you need a thinkpad. it caught me off-guard when I picked up mine many years ago, because I was not looking for three buttons on a laptop. but it quickly became my favorite feature.
As an X11 user, I think that select/single button paste is one of the better features of the platform. I miss it terribly when on windows.
I have two Lenovos and a MacBook Pro here in front of me.
Believe me, when I say Plan9/9front/rio has a crap UX on laptops, it isn't due to lack of trying. Even when I ran an Plan9 "terminal" on a Pi with a three-button mouse, the UX was bad.
> As an X11 user, I think that select/single button paste is one of the better features of the platform. I miss it terribly when on windows.
As a compulsive text-highlighter, I've always found it useless. Between that and not being able to copy-and-replace with it, I'd say I've used it by accident at least as often as I've used it on purpose. And I've been using X-window systems since before 3-button (no scrollwheel) mice went all-but extinct, so I should have been able to get used to it if I was ever going to.
I can see that would be annoying, however for me...
Imagine if every time you hit ctrl+c or ctrl+v a dialog opened up asking if you are sure you want to copy or paste. a bit annoying, breaks your train of thought, and doubles your keypresses.
That is what it feels like to go from x11 to windows.
I don’t know how people use trackpads for anything but causal use anyway, even on a Mac I find them to be a constant strain on my psyche compared to using my mouse- I always have one on me if I have my laptop
You wrist-movers just can't handle the way we shine wondrously with our bright reds and blues, how we glide smoothly and graciously across the screen with the tiniest motion of a single finger, using a trackball is the closest a man comes to godliness.
ooooh, I see. I was imagining some kind of complex clicky mechanism - of course that's not necessary here, the touchpad has one built-in, I didn't realize. Thanks for the clarification.
The UI and UX have been evolving. Looks like riow is part of the mainline now, bar(1) was added. Not to mention zuke and some other great programs written in the last year or two by ftrvxmtrx, who's doing a lot of heavy lifting. There's a video player added, and lots of other new cool stuff. See shithub.us for more.
However, the window management feels rather cumbersome and not offering decent keyboard navigation and shortcuts as a complement to chording is, to me, the single most annoying "feature", laptop or not.