Wio: Plan 9's Rio Windowing System Re-Implemented As A Wayland Compositor

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wio: Plan 9's Rio Windowing System Re-Implemented As A Wayland Compositor

Wio is the newest Wayland compositor out there and re-implements Rio, the windowing system used by Bell Labs' Plan 9 operating system...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...and-Compositor

[Hugh]

I'm implying nothing about the lineage but simply referring to that GIMP-like windowing system most people only know from windows 3.11 nowadays.

I don't really know what that means.

Functionality wise, Sam uses a cleaned up version of ed's command language with Ken's regular extensions in the same style you find in sed and Acme's Edit command.

Rob certainly thought "structural regular expressions" were an important new idea and they were at the centre of sam. http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/struc...regexps/se.pdf

[CrystalGamma]

Interesting to see people not asking the obvious question: If every application runs its own compositor, what is it compositing?

[c117152]

What do you mean by "win3.1 style text editor"?

Rob Pike worked on the University of Toronto's version of UNIX ed and the qed editor before creating sam. I assume that those informed his design of sam.

I'm implying nothing about the lineage but simply referring to that GIMP-like windowing system most people only know from windows 3.11 nowadays. Functionality wise, Sam uses a cleaned up version of ed's command language with Ken's regular extensions in the same style you find in sed and Acme's Edit command.

Anyhow, between plan9port's sam and acme you can pretty much get an idea of it all. And if you want a standalone Sam you can look here: https://github.com/deadpixi/sam

Modern and popular tools wise, vis is good: https://github.com/martanne/vis

Personally I feel there's room for a mature, plumbing, chording editor with complex text rendering and highlighters at the very least. Alas, there's an Emacs mode for those so no one will bother making it

[DarkFoss]

When I hear Plan 9 I automatically think Godzilla movie.

[IliaB]

A stupid question: Why everyone develops only i3-like WMs for Wayland? Why still there's no any OpenBox/Fluxbox/PekWM-like WM? :v

There is a WIP which is explicitly trying to be Openbox-like: https://github.com/wizbright/waybox

(Shameless plug) There is also this compositor which I'm the primary dev: https://github.com/WayfireWM/wayfire It is already usable and is floating compositor, nothing i3-like. There are a couple of smaller projects using wlroots that are also not tiling, check out the wlroots wiki for a comprehensive list.

[ermo]

A stupid question: Why everyone develops only i3-like WMs for Wayland? Why still there's no any OpenBox/Fluxbox/PekWM-like WM? :v

Just a wild guess, but perhaps the people developing i3-like WMs have both the skills to develop a WM and prefer the cross-section of features in i3?

AIUI, Mr. Devault simply showed up and did the work for sway (and wlroots) and in the process of doing so, attracted numerous other developers.

It is entirely possible that OpenBox et al. might not have the same pull/mindshare and that, by extension, nobody has bothered enough to want to reimplement them for Wayland?

[profoundWHALE]

I love the minimalist and super functional DE at the ~2:30 mark. The colours and visual design is pleasing and not complex.

[Hugh]

Sam - a win3.1 style text editor - was (is?) still being used by a couple of the old timers

What do you mean by "win3.1 style text editor"?

Rob Pike worked on the University of Toronto's version of UNIX ed and the qed editor before creating sam. I assume that those informed his design of sam.

[c117152]

This is really cool, that an application can take over a window. But what is the overhead of running each application in its own nested Wayland compositor?

Since each window in wayland already allocates its own buffer, I'm guessing it's about the same as usual.

Also, launching an application by creating a new window by drawing the window size with the mouse on the screen is not how I would like to work. That is not good window management. That is not intuitive. That is not good usability.

You're not wrong. Though Sam - a win3.1 style text editor - was (is?) still being used by a couple of the old timers, most of plan9's development was done using Acme which is a tiling text editor that leveraged this in-frame functionality to run the terminal and image / pdf viewers internally. Actually I think it run everything internally but I can't remember every trying to run the web browsers in it too.

More so was the fact Rio had everything exposed on the file-system so people run scripts effectively converting it into a tiling windows manager on login.

Anyhow, plan9port still has both and there are third parties maintaining and packaging different versions of Acme and Sam if you're curious. And if you're feeling particularly adventures there's 9front...

Either way, I think it would be nice to see this functionality ported into Sway even if it's limited to a few supporting applications and what not. Maybe the suckless guys will help since they were working towards something similar a few years ago. And of course, emacs already has all that one way or another...