I will not pass up an opportunity to make you talk about Plan 9, so let’s focus on Acme.
Acme is remarkable for what it represents: a class of application that leverages a simple, text-based GUI to create a compelling model of interacting with all of the tools available in the Unix (or Plan 9) environment. Cox calls it an “integrating development environment,” distinguishing it from the more hermetic “integrated development environment” developers will be familiar with. The simplicity of its interface is important. It is what has allowed Acme to age gracefully over the past 30 or so years, without the constant churn of adding support for new languages, compilers, terminals, or color schemes.
↫ Daniel Moch
While the article mentions you can use Acme on UNIX, to really appreciate it you have to use it on Plan 9, which today most likely means 9front. Now, I am not the kind of person who can live and breathe inside 9front – you need to be of a certain mindset to be able to do so – but even then I find that messing around with Plan 9 has given me a different outlook on UNIX. In fact, I think it has helped me understand UNIX and UNIX-like systems better and more thoroughly.
If you’re not sure if Plan 9 is something that suits you, the only real way to find out is to just use it. Fire up a VM, read the excellent documentation at 9front, and just dive into it. Most of you will just end up confused and disoriented, but a small few of you will magically discover you possess the right mindset.
Just do it.
Thom Holwerda,
Agree, give it a shot. It’s more unixy than unix, haha. I guess that’s technically wrong, but they took the ideas unix had and went further with them.
Every time you review these I always get the same idea: osnews should host these in a javascript based VM.
Here are some examples
https://bellard.org/jslinux/
(some riscv64 emulation no less!)
For those who don’t know, Fabrice Bellard is the original author behind QEMU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard
It might be possible to set these up to try the operating systems in browser on osnews. Thom if there’s any interest in this, we might be able to make this happen. Lets get the discussion going if you are interested. It’d just be such a neat addition to the articles and it could be fun to try.