Chris's favorite graphical programs: the footnotes

Plan 9 from Bell Labs.

Plan 9 is the operating system that the people at Bell Labs wrote when they gave up on Unix; it throws out a number of backwards compatibility things in order to distill several powerful ideas down to their core. In the process, they took the time to fix a number of associated programs, like the shell. Plan 9 as used in Bell Labs is a highly graphical system; everyone has a graphical workstation on their desk (which is just a Plan 9 machine running some specific software, like the graphical system). It's also notable for being the first system to fully support Unicode (and thus all sorts of foreign character sets).

9term.

9term is non-terminal emulator (modeled after the windows you get in Plan 9's 8 1/2 windowing system), somewhat like xterm except that it isn't cursor-addressable. Instead, you get the ability to edit and reuse all the text, instead of just the current command line (although you get full cut and paste editing there as well). While hard to explain, this is remarkably powerful; it's quite amazing how much text you retype or copy and how much being able to edit and reuse it directly helps. Like Plan 9, 9term handles Unicode (with the correct fonts). It doesn't work very well with shells that want to do their own command line editing; I've found that rc (another Plan 9 import) works well with it.

sam.

Sam is Rob Pike's Blit editor, redone for Plan 9 (and then ported to Unix by Howard Trickey). A concise description is ed on steroids with windows; it has both very powerful underlying operations and the first mouse-based editing interface that I've found where I prefer to use the mouse rather than the keyboard. Here's a gratuitous screenshot of sam in action. Like 9term, sam fully supports Unicode.

wily.

Wily is a Unix reimplementation of Rob Pike's acme user interface for Plan 9. Wily is hard to describe, but it is somewhere between an editor and an environment for running programs. I find that it's best used when I want to do more than just edit text; a suitable example is porting a program from the net on a new system, an activity that mixes editing a bunch of files with poking at compiles and various other things. Like acme, wily holds out the promise of building sophisticated interfaces with simple programming, somewhat like a graphical version of the Unix shell.

tkman.

A manual page browser written in TK/TCL, with many slick and nice features, including sleazy low-rent hypertext links and nice reformatting of manual pages. It's much better than xman; where xman is painful to use, tkman is lovely (to the point where I prefer it to running man in an xterm window, which is the point of having graphical manpage browsers).

exmh.

Also written in TK/TCL, exmh is a frontend to MH; being graphical it handles MIME very nicely (much nicer than MH's mhn, who's output is particularly loathsome). Unlike xmh, it doesn't feature a revolting interface (and it understands nested folders), and so I find it a very good way of dealing with my high volume of mail.

A Digression