Some new papers
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Title: Long Bets
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All bets are for $1.
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Neale's prediction is the one stated.
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Los Angeles Population (Blake)
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------------------------------
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On Feb 24, 2029, the metropolitan area commonly known as "Los Angeles"
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will have, at most recent measure, double-digit population decrease.
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Title: Working with plan9port
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Since I enjoy trying new things,
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I'm giving Plan 9 from Userspace a try in 2013.
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Here are my notes.
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I hope to turn this into a proper essay at some point.
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My initial impression is that Plan 9 is what Unix would have been,
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if Unix had been able to stick to its "small programs that do one thing well"
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and "everything is a file" philosophy.
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Instead, we got things like the Berkeley Socket API,
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and the X windowing system,
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which while unquestionably useful,
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were sort of foreign design concepts placed on top of Unix.
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Worst Support Community Ever
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---------------------------
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The Plan 9 user community
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I keep coming into contact with is without exaggeration the
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most hostile and combative group of people
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I have ever encountered in my 20 years of computing.
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I'm sure there are helpful and friendly people associated with Plan 9,
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but they are not making easy-to-find web pages,
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hanging out on IRC,
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or commenting on public fora.
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It's not worth delving further into this,
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just be aware that if you want to try anything related to Plan 9,
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plan to work out problems on your own.
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Asking for help will get you nothing but insulted.
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Installing
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--------
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Since I use Arch Linux,
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installation was as simple as typing "pacman -S plan9port".
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When I went to put it on my Ubuntu machine at work,
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I had merely to untar a single file into /opt/plan9 and run "make".
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Installation was easy.
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plan9port comes with a "9" program that prepends /opt/plan9 to the path,
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which you could copy into your normal path somewhere and not need to modify any additional paths.
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I actually like having it in my path,
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but I put it at the end,
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since it provides a few binaries with the same name but different usage than standard Unix.
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File Systems
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------------
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Plan 9 makes a big deal about file systems,
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and Unix doesn't have that kind of functionality in it.
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A lot of my work involves using ssh to get to various different computers,
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and it's my understanding that a Plan 9 network hardly ever needs a "remote shell".
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I've begun using sshfs a lot,
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and I have to admit it's actually pretty nice.
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Previously I'd been able to use "tramp-mode" in emacs to get to files on remote machines,
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but sshfs lets me do this from the shell (and everything else) too.
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The Mouse
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Everything here relies pretty heavily on the mouse for everything other than character input.
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Coming as I am from dwm, emacs, and vim,
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this was quite a shock.
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Interestingly, I adjusted to it in under a day,
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and now I find myself grumbling when I have to use vi,
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using a Manhattan algorithm to move the cursor to a specific point that I'm looking right at.
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I think the mouse may actually be relieving me of some of a fair amount of mental busy-work,
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and I've noticed I'm using it more in places where I'd previously complained about having to.
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Acme and 9term use "mouse chording".
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You have to hold button 1 then click button 2 to cut text, for instance.
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Hold 1 then click 3 to paste.
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I went digging and found an old 3-button mouse (with no scroll wheel)
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and started using it at work.
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It was actually kind of nice having a real middle button,
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even in normal Unix programs like xterm and chromium.
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At home I acquired a "Microsoft Explorer Touch" mouse,
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which is a brand new wireless mouse with a trackpad on the middle button
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for scrolling up/down and left/right.
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It's a bit heavier than I'm used to and makes my pinky finger tired,
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but for the image editing software I use,
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having a scroll wheel is handy.
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Scroll Bars
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--------
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The scroll bars in Acme and 9term work very similarly to the Athena or Tk scroll bars,
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which I've always liked.
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In fact, I like Acme's scroll bar behavior so much,
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I worked out how to make xterm's scroll bar work the same way
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with a .Xresources entry:
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! Make Athena scrollbars more like Plan9 scrollbars
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*Scrollbar.translations: #override\
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<Btn1Down>: StartScroll(Backward) \n\
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<Btn3Down>: StartScroll(Forward) \n\
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<BtnUp>: NotifyScroll(Proportional) EndScroll()
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Acme
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----
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Acme is really interesting in a number of ways.
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It hardly does anything at all out of the box,
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other than a rudimentary file navigator,
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and allowing you to edit text files.
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Editing text files is most of what I do in my job as a programmer,
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so I was pretty skeptical that this was going to work out.
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I ought to have a gigantic text editor with complex functionality,
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right?
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As it turns out,
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because I'm also pretty quick at writing software,
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I didn't really need that much complexity in my editor.
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I just needed an easy way to run programs on parts of my text.
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Acme lets you pipe text through anything you want.
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You type "|program" somewhere (probably the blue bar for the buffer),
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highlight the text you want to work on,
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then middle-click "|program".
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So if I want to word-wrap,
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I can put "|fmt" in the blue bar and middle-click it when I need it.
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If I want to reindent a section of C code,
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I cat put "|indent".
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I wrote a program called "→" that inserts tabs at the beginning of each line of input,
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and another program called "←" that removes one leading tab.
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This is actually really nice,
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because I don't need to remember any Acme-specific editing commands,
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I can just use the Unix commands I'd use at the shell.
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Acme also exposes a file-system interface to manipulate windows.
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So you can use it like Emacs,
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making applications that use it for the interface,
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but you can write your application in whatever language you prefer
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and just interact with the display through manipulating files.
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I haven't done much with this yet,
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but I plan to.
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Acme seems hopelessly lost when confronted with a filename or directory
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with a space in it.
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Rio
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---
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Rio is name of the Window Manager that comes with plan9port.
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It seems to be an emulation of Plan 9's windowing system.
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It feels almost unusable,
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but I'm going to give it my standard 2 week trial.
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After a few days with Rio and Acme,
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I went and got a bigger monitor.
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I'd been using a 15-inch monitor for years,
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but now suddenly I want something larger.
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I miss dwm's keybindings.
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But I do actually sort of like needing to use the mouse for everything.
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dwm was causing me to type into the wrong window, somehow.
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I've had to install a new (graphical) music player.
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It's not the end of the world.
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I think it's funny how Plan 9 is what it took to make me comfortable with using
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graphical programs.
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Feb 20
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One of the things I missed about dwm was the little status bar.
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I'd written a clever little
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[status program](http://woozle.org/~neale/g.cgi/status)
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to monitor various things (time, battery, load average)
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and run a shell script periodically to do more expensive things like
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checking my IMAP boxes.
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Last night I rediscovered the
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[dzen2](https://github.com/robm/dzen)
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program,
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which reads stdin and displays it in a little text window.
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I added a `printf` to my status program and now I've got that functionality back.
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Yesterday I also realized I could remove the graphical music thing I'd installed,
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and go back to mpd.
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I can put some commands in the very top bar in acme:
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v-, v+, toggle, next, prev
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right-clicking will send to the plumber,
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which I now have configured to change volume and control mpd.
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