Comment by pjmlp
8 days ago
This is a limitation of UNIX terminals, in other platforms not tied to a no longer existing tty interface, this isn't an issue.
Unfortunely, given that we are stuck with UNIX derived OSes, this is indeed a possible issue.
However I would argue, for fancy stuff there is the GUI right there.
I don't know any GUI that beats tmux work portability.
Of course everything depends on exact nature of the work, but personally I would gladly leave text based interfaces behind, it's just that there's nothing better.
I know UNIX since being introduced to it via Xenix in 1992 thereabouts, and never found a use for tmux.
More so, I use the terminal as strictly necessary and nothing more.
I don't want "a terminal", I want a command based interface combined with being able to use the same set of tools/commands on all the files I interact with.
Like, it gets taken for granted, but being able to literally grep my html file, my program source and my readme file, instead of having to open a separate gui program and using its bespoke seach menu feature, is really, really nice.
There are downsides of course, like the way we keep jamming everything into the square hole that is 1980s terminal emulators and character based displays, but frequently this is worth it.
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9front/plan9 leaves tmux and the like as toys. The moment you can use system tools, 9p and files on everything (even the text of the editor itself) you wont be back to these unusable teletype emulators, be XTerm clones or terminal multiplexors.
Unix downvoters should have a look on 9front (the most featureful/supported plan9 fork out there) in order to realize that you can follow the Unix philosophy (even more than OpenBSD itself) tossing the VT100 emulators to the legacy 'vt' emulator if you want somehow use ancient software (or SSH) while setting actual graphical windows with the shell running inside with no terminals at all. No more damn control codes messing up everything. No more linebreaks. You can cut down your text with the mouse from day one. Even under Sam, which is something like a graphical Ed crossed with Notepad and much more powerful expressions than Ex/Vi ones.
The 9front web site is certainly.. something.
https://9front.org
(I didn't downvote you.) Plan 9 made some really cool design decisions, and I keep looking for places to use 9P. I also believe that Plan 9, as an artifact of its era, bet too heavily on the mouse and pixel-mapped graphics. Text, character-cell terminal emulation, and SSH won for good reasons. "GUI > terminal" is a separate matter from "Plan 9 > Unix".
In some important ways, even text with hacky escape codes is more useful and more robust than a fundamentally graphical interface. Text scales up and down with display size and pixel density. Text works over high-latency links and enables simple latency compensation like in Mosh. Text gives you universal copy-paste. Text is more accessible for humans and for machines.
I use a virtual terminal daily on my phone. If we literally used rio GUIs designed around the three-button mouse and desktop pixel density, it would be a lot less ergonomic. I'd like to see a successor to the VT220 lineage, but it's easier to imagine it built on text.
> I also believe that Plan 9, as an artifact of its era, bet too heavily on the mouse and pixel-mapped graphics. Text, character-cell terminal emulation, and SSH won for good reasons. "GUI > terminal" is a separate matter from "Plan 9 > Unix".
What era? That is exactly the workflow of everyone using macOS and Windows around here.
Connecting to cloud environemnts is also done via a mix of RDP, VNC, Web GUI based tooling, akin to a modern X Windows replacement.
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No, it's the opposite. in order to send commands to a hosts you shouldn't need a terminal emulator (twice or thrice, depending on the SSH, tmux and the VTY subsystem under Unix) and even sending baud information. 9front just gives you the graphical window and the shell. Mosh? Ok, 9p and more can be almost stateless in order to not drop the connections. Still, you aren't bound to neither escape codes nor to crude hacks as SINWINCH and horrors to copy and paste text under Tmux/Screen. Don't get me started on trying to do such tasks with URL's.
Text? I do that under 9front, too. Heck, rc it's simpler there than sh itself. I can bind remote machines and use their scripts as if they were my own. I can import remote devices. I can do stuff without resorting to crude hacks with openssl and nc. C itself it's far simpler. Text, you say? No locales, and UTF8 everywhere. I can freely resize the windows and still cut and paste stuff like nothing. It's 2025. The closest workflow under Unix would be Bitlbee + any client for it, msmtp and mbsync for Email and any graphical client against the SLRN cache in order to be as usable.
Rio can use different fonts just fine, you know. There are several users using 24 px fonts on HD screens without no issues. With riow you get 'virtual desktops' a la cwm/i3 and the like.
>Three button mouse. I don't do mouse chords, but I get more universal copy and paste as I stated that the old Unix itself, with shorter and easier scripts again... than Unix.
On snarf/paste instead of the menu, modyfing rio/sam and the like for a keybinding can be something done under an afternoon. Riow can already manage windows and close then with keybings among the mentioned virtual desktops.
Oh, and BTW... for vi users... I consider the Sam regular expresions far more powerful than the vi keys themselves. I can highlight the text with the mouse and write a sam command (on acme too) which affects the selection and in an easier way than the old syntax. The best of both worlds. RSI? Well, that's a point for Unix, but with the Windows key + 1-4 the mouse usage can be reduced a lot.
And, again, the 9front API it's dumb simple; I'm pretty sure doing stuff like mapping the Windows key +j-k-l to mouse button 1-2-3 would be something relatively easy, even setting sticky menus. With that small patch tons of usability issues would go away. Meanwhile, under X.org, Wayland, evdev and the $toolkit of the day... good luck.
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