| i wasn't talking about adding syscalls to the round trip of array access, i was talking about controlling a running system or speaking a protocol. for the canonical example, i refer you to http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/3/ip http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/3/tls http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/2/dial note the net argument to dial(2). the point isn't direct access (as evidenced by its encapsulation in a library, which is common in message-passing interfaces; same principle as erlang discouraging direct message sends to a gen_server pid); the point is namespacing, addressing, and protocol. "tls" is just another network you can dial on like "tcp", as are the contents of /net as, say, imported from another machine (you can imagine how trivial a vpn becomes). "everything is a file" is miserable and, if you dig sufficiently deep, false, on unix because the unix concept of "file" is insufficiently general and weighed down with the baggage of teletypes and disks. not so with plan 9, nor with, if you prefer, a modern example: https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts/process/namespaces anyway i don't want to belabour that further as the real reason acme is relevant to this thread is the context of mousing around in a text editor: > [...] It's just always a bad idea to do it. [...] i mean that "acme does well" at avoiding the clumsy manual scrolling and windowing you advise against -- we're in near ideological agreement here. > The number of times I want a new window to pop up is very limited this is a matter of taste that traces back to the uproar against the demise of the “spatial finder” in the os 9 -> os x transition, but what i was getting at is that i do have a predictable, static layout; let me describe it: three columns i never resize in the form 80-80-remainder. terminal session and error buffer live in the right hand side, a given window dominates each of the 80-column columns, with perhaps a few titlebars of other files each. accordingly... > For instance, in Emacs it's possible to resize the window by dragging its margins with a mouse ...refocusing within a column, whether indirectly by plumbed reference jump or directly by one click, doesn't register as window management to me. the dynamic is far more like selecting from a menu, or operating a library stack. the titlebars occupy insignificant real estate, and visually serve as an overview of the entire context i'm working with, which spares me significant mental bandwidth when either tabbing to and from another program, or getting out of my chair and back into it. |