Ghosts of Unix Past

aw3c2 · on Dec 5, 2010

Actual link: http://lwn.net/Articles/411845/

There are several parts, links are on the bottom of each chapter.

thristian · on Dec 5, 2010

A lot has been said about how Plan9 is "Unix with all the design issues fixed", but as much as I like the idea of "everything is really, really a file", I'm not sure whether I could get used to the Xerox Star style GUI (which you can't easily replace, since it too is exposed to the filesystem), or trade my lovely Vim in for Acme.

anon_d · on Dec 5, 2010

GUI (which you can't easily replace, since it too is exposed to the filesystem)

What? The graphics system is quite nice, there's no reason to replace that. I'm pretty sure there is nothing tying the graphics protocol to their GUI paradigm. I think it would be entirely possible to implement, say, GTK over it.

Vim

There's no reason it couldn't be ported. I would use it if you made it. It would be nice to have a libdraw based vi, even just in plan9port.

jfb · on Dec 5, 2010

I thought this was excellent. I highly encourage everyone to read all five parts; the bits about signals were particularly enlightening to me.