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9front “The Golden Age of Ballooning” Released

• rcarmo 4y ago
  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).
  • nix23 4y ago
    >UX simply isn’t a good fit for today’s laptops Maybe you just have the wrong laptops ;)
    • abudabi123 4y ago
      Members of the 9front dev-community have recommended the MNT Reform.
      • turminal 4y ago
        And various thinkpads.
    • rcarmo 4y ago
      As said above, I have two Lenovos and a MacBook Pro here in front of me.
      • nix23 4y ago
        But is it a thinkpad with 3 buttons? ;)
        • rcarmo 4y ago
          X1 Carbon Gen 6, top of the line. The 3 button UX is still atrocious regardless of any way you try to defend it...
          • nix23 4y ago
            >The 3 button UX is still atrocious regardless Speak for yourself...
  • witheld 4y ago
    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
    • causi 4y ago
      Clickpads are horrible, but touchpads aren't so bad when they have tactile buttons. That's why I always print some for mine.
      • exikyut 4y ago
        *Tries to imagine what the STL for a clickable button would look like*
        • causi 4y ago
          https://www.tinkercad.com/things/9igWZfgh07J https://www.tinkercad.com/things/9igWZfgh07J
          • exikyut 4y ago
            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.
    • meepmorp 4y ago
      By contrast, I don't know how people put up with mice. I discovered a cirque touchpad in the mid-90s and i've preferred them ever since. Of course, nothing's worse than the weirdos who like trackballs.
      • ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
        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.
  • arexxbifs 4y ago
    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.
    • sitkack 4y ago
      Is it an inherent flaw in 9front or could it be fixed with an input router?
      • arexxbifs 4y ago
        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". https://plan9.io/sys/doc/acme/acme.html https://plan9.io/sys/doc/acme/acme.html
        • sitkack 4y ago
          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. Does that make sense?
          • 4y ago
  • samstave 4y ago
    I use a five button mouse...(6 if include scroll wheel)
  • somat 4y ago
    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.
    • rcarmo 4y ago
      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.
    • yamtaddle 4y ago
      > 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.
      • somat 4y ago
        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.
  • MisterTea 4y ago
    > UX will likely never change (the three-button mouse UX simply isn’t a good fit for today’s laptops). Patches welcome.
  • calvinmorrison 4y ago
    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.
• morsch 4y ago
  It's a fork of Plan 9. Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12617036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12617036
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • pencilguin 4y ago
    Seems like they could say so somewhere at surface level.
• ogogmad 4y ago
  Can Acme be made to provide code-completion / Intellisense type features, similar to what Java and C# programmers expect? Can it provide a decent REPL, like iPython?
  • farhaven 4y ago
    Yes. There's [acme-lsp](https://github.com/fhs/acme-lsp https://github.com/fhs/acme-lsp) for providing language server integration and things like "jump to definition", "show hover-help" and so on. I personally use `autokey` on Linux and `sxhkd` on macOS for adding a key binding for `acme-lsp`'s `Lcomp` command which performs completion. There's also [Watch](https://pkg.go.dev/9fans.net/go/acme/Watch https://pkg.go.dev/9fans.net/go/acme/Watch) for monitoring a directory of files for changes and running a command in a persistent Acme window. I use that for continuously running unit tests while I edit some piece of code, or for automatically running `go generate` and such. For your REPL needs, there's the `win` command that implements a basic dumb terminal as an Acme window. This provides a few goodies like letting you edit the terminal buffer with Acme's `Edit` command and its embedded Sam command language, as well as adding "snippets" that can be executed with one click of the middle mouse button. Acme by itself is already plenty useful (`win` is part of the "standard distribution" so to speak, in that it is part of the various Plan9 forks and of plan9port), and a lot of extra stuff can be built rather quickly by hooking into its 9p interface: For example, my tool to add commonly used tools to the tag (the blue line at the top of each text window that contains the file name and commands that act on the window) is a handful of lines of shell script that parse entries in acme's `acme/log` file and select the appropriate tools to add based on the name of newly opened files. My Git integration is a thin wrapper around `win` and `git commit --interactive` that pops open a window that allows me to author a Git commit similar to (but a lot simpler than) magit for emacs and fugitive for Vim work. Even if you're not in Plan9 (or one of the forks), I encourage you to give [plan9port](https://github.com/9fans/plan9port)'s https://github.com/9fans/plan9port)'s Acme a spin. (FWIW, this post was written in an Acme window because it's a lot more intuitive to use after some getting used to than regular ol' GTK text boxes used by Firefox.)
• preya2k 4y ago
  This page does a horrible job of explaining what it's about.
  • nix23 4y ago
    Baloons....it's written on top.
  • radiorental 4y ago
    It does, it took me a minute to click on the "fqa" (o; but I absolutely love the design, humour and aesthetic. The web needs more of this oddballness. Dare I say, odd balloon-ness
    • cies 4y ago
      Pretty extensive! Sadly they stopped making fun of nazis: http://fqa.9front.org/fqa1.html#1.3.0.1 http://fqa.9front.org/fqa1.html#1.3.0.1 Who told them it is bad taste? > The web needs more of this oddballness. Yups. This kind of websites give me nostalgia. HN too btw.
      • aliqot 4y ago
        People complained about Mein Kampf being included in the source code.
      • entaloneralie 4y ago
        There was some imagery that compared using Ruby to going through Auschwitz. I think they did well by removing this one. - Not a Ruby fan
  • forgotpwd16 4y ago
    Notable changes few, minor changes numerous.
    • ori_b 4y ago
      Depends on what you find notable. An IME for CJK languages, as well as some others, didn't make the list. (http://man.9front.org/1/ktrans http://man.9front.org/1/ktrans)
• MonkeyClub 4y ago
  This in the front page's legend made me snicker: "Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!" Now, what does that remind me of? :)
  • eequah9L 4y ago
    The number is randomly-generated BTW :)
• daggersandscars 4y ago
  For those unfamiliar with Monty Python's Flying Circus, "The Golden Age of Ballooning" is the first episode of the fourth and final season, notable for being the first episode without John Cleese.[0] No idea if 9front is intentionally referring to this. [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0650996/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0650996/
  • aap_ 4y ago
    Yes.
  • donatj 4y ago
    It is one of my favorite episodes too! It’s got such a different feel than the rest of the series, it really sticks out conceptually. I find myself thinking of it from time to time.
  • thesuitonym 4y ago
    Given the general tone of 9front, I would say the reference is intentional.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• aliqot 4y ago
  When Plan9 gets posted to HN, the feelings are complex. I love you guys, I really do, but plan9 might have been passed up on by the segment of the hn audience who'd have loved it most. Plan9 is a project that does things very differently on purpose. A lot of things don't make sense at first, like the 3 finger mouse paradigm, plumbing, mainframe mentality. What I fear is that the more people from HN are introduced to it from a standpoint of "Hey look at this novelty, it just got a new release" the more people will find it, love it as I did, but then ignoring context, completely hold the community hostage with the curse of popularity to change everything we know and love about it to make it the same OS they left for plan9. Younger devs with terrible ideas are capable enough now to implement things themselves, and I worry that with the miniscule amount of devwork it would take to make huge waves in the plan9 community, I can only hope that people with very shitty ideas dont jump in and make a splash because it'll be hard for the community to say no. Plan9 is very unapologetic, has lots of rough edges, and 9 front specifically can ruffle some feathers with regard to content and imagery, like the copy of Mein Kampf being in every copy of the source code, im not saying it meant something, but that was our joke, and new people hated that. It could have been a goosebumps book but it'd meant the same. We're already seeing that being tamped down by those who don't understand the spirit behind it. You'll know I'm right if the only replies to this comment will be on the inflammatory parts, not the revolutionary parts. So like I said. It's complicated seeing it on HN. On one hand I want the world to know this technology that sadly we left behind and seem hellbent on reinventing. On the other hand, a lot of you guys suck now, and are too capable for the limited amount of forethought you have. I guess all I'm trying to say is, treat my baby right. I'm trusting you guys to enjoy it like the rest of us did. Also please take this as gracefully as possible, but a lot of you have the worst ideas... like the absolute worst most misinformed, heart aint even in the right place, no forethought, just terrible ideas. The rest of you are fine. I'll take my downvotes in a to-go box, as usual.
  • MisterTea 4y ago
    > like the copy of Mein Kampf being in every copy of the source code It was an over the top political gag in response to the original labs people inserting a copy of the gettysburg address in /lib. It was removed as the gag was lost on most people.
• aidenn0 4y ago
  Wasn't sure what this is, so I went to the homepage and noticed it has the line "Only X remote holes in the default install in a heck of a long time" where X changes on every page load.
  • wrycoder 4y ago
    Spoof on https://www.openbsd.org/ https://www.openbsd.org/
• friend_and_foe 4y ago
  I like the idea of moving past Unix, getting rid of the baud rate on your terminal and no longer just emulating a VT1000, new operating paradigms and overall saying no to legacy compatibility in favor of actually moving into the future. I'm not convinced the mouse is the way to go. They're so limiting; I have a panel of switches in front of me that can do anything I want and it defaults to typewriter all of the time. Meanwhile i use one finger for everything except typing. That's a bit ridiculous. Currently I'm convinced, a modular microkernel with a plain graphical environment built around keyboard and tiling windows is the way to go. You can get graphical composability with a tiling paradigm. You can't get it any other way IMO. Behind the scenes, can we get rid of languages-as-APIs and all these convoluted libraries? I think a binary should be self contained besides interfacing with hardware and the operating environment. A good approach to graphical computing environments is a standardized API for graphical applications that the environment plugs into and renders, rather than the application itself rendering itself graphically. This would enable graphical composability as well, two graphical applications can call each other via their API and interact easily.