First Impressions With 9Front

I used Plan9 a *long* time ago a couple of times to see what it was like and ran away pretty quickly. The main issue I had from a vague and distant memory was that I approached it as a mainstream Operating System rather than as an unfinished science experiment.

Over the past few months I've been reading a lot about Plan9 again, in particular thanks to reading the posts of Julienxx, Devine Lu Linvega and watching a talk by Ori Bernstein on YouTube. In case these wonderful people ever read this, it's all your fault I'm here.

I'm writing this from plan9 but over SSH and using vi which feels like a cop-out but I'm not yet ready to start writing gemlogs in acme or sam. Compared to AT&T's Plan9 I tried years ago it feels similar but with more stuff bundled in. It's less scary but I'm also approaching it for different reasons. I'm not looking for an Operating System (I already have options there). I'm looking to explore plan9 and it's features.

The Installation process was straightforward. The FQA is fairly useful but riddled with cruft and I feel that same sense of pointless in-joke cruft is here in 9front too. The very first commands I ran were bullshit(1), troll(1) and theo(1). I did enjoy reading the emacs(1) man page.

In his talk, Ori Bernstein said that while the things ported from plan9 are great, you don't get a feel for what plan9 offers from using them in Linux. What plan9 offers isn't from what's included, it's from what's not there. I may be paraphrasing him a little, but it struck a chord with me. I can mount an SSHFS filesystem across the Internet if I like, but it was quite a thing to go:

term% 9fs 9front

And suddenly have the entire archive of everything 9front under /n. It's clear that plan9 never had anything approaching a ux designer, but that's ok. That's not why I'm here. I'm here to learn and this time I won't run away screaming with unrealistic expectations of what it can provide.