140 lines
3.1 KiB
Markdown
140 lines
3.1 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: Making Unix a little more Plan9-like
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description: How to make your X11 stuff feel more like Plan9
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section: computing
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---
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I'm not really interested in defending anything.
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I tried out plan9port and liked it,
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but I have to live in Unix land.
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Here's how I set that up.
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A Warning
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--------
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The suckless community,
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and some of the plan9 communities,
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are dominated by jackasses.
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I hope that's strong enough wording to impress the severity.
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Don't go into IRC for help.
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Stay off the suckless email list.
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The software is great,
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the people who write it are well-spoken and well-reasoned,
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but for some reason the fandom is horrible to everyone.
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xterm
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-----
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9term has some really cool ideas.
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But Unix has a long history of using graphical terminals,
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and lots of stuff needs VT220 compatibility.
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xterm is a good compromise.
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You can make the xterm scroll bar (and all other Athena scrollbars) prettier
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with this in your X resources:
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*Scrollbar.thickness: 10
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*Scrollbar.thumb: None
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*Scrollbar.foreground: gray80
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*Scrollbar.background: gray50
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*Scrollbar.borderWidth: 3
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*ScrollBarBorder: 0
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This will swap the left and right mouse buttons,
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to work like acme and 9term:
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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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A side note:
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if xrdb is never run and your root window doesn't have a
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`RESOURCE_MANAGER` property set,
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libXaw will read `$HOME/.Xdefaults`.
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This is supposedly deprecated,
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but Xaw is so ancient it will probably never be removed.
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9wm
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----
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I'm now maintaining the 9wm window manager.
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If you like rio you should give it a whirl,
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there are some differences you might prefer.
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https://github.com/9wm/9wm
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sshfs
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-----
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As a non-root user,
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you can mount remote file systems locally with `sshfs`.
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It's probably as close as Unix is going to get for a while,
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and it's not awful.
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lm
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--
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The plan9 `lm` command is great:
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it's like `apropos` or `man -k` but it outputs lines you can
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copy and paste into a prompt to pull up the page.
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Here's a script to do the same thing with Unix:
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#! /bin/sh
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apropos -l "$@" | sed 's/\(.*\) (\(.*\)) * - /man \2 \1 # /'
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xdg-open
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--------
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This is the current Linux notion of how to do things like the plumber.
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Just about every modern program calls out to it to open files,
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and it uses whichever one is first in your path,
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so you can make a little script to do what you want and
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avoid having to configure all the weirdo files in ~/.config
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#! /bin/sh
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case "$1" in
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*://*)
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exec web "$1"
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;;
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*.pdf)
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exec my-pdf-viewer "$1"
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;;
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esac
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mon
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---
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Russ Cox uses a program called `mon`
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to watch files and run them whenever they change.
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This is pretty handy for iterative debugging,
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you don't have to keep re-running your program every time you
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save/compile.
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Here's a start at one.
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It can be improved.
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#! /bin/sh
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while true; do
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gonow=
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stat=$(stat --format=%Y.%Z.%s $1)
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if [ "$stat" != "${laststat:-$stat}" ]; then
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laststat=$stat
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gonow=yes
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fi
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if [ -n "$gonow" ]; then
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echo "[[=== start ===]]"
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$@
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echo "[[=== done ===]]"
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fi
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laststat=$stat
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sleep 1
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done
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