Plan9

Plan9 is an operating system by the authors of the original Unix, with integrated support for distributed applications.

Plan9 has its own windowing system, rio, quite different from X11.

It is possible to connect to Plan9 machines by drawterm from Unix machines running X11. drawterm starts the windowing system on the remote Plan9 and everything works as if sitting in front of it.

While typing from one machine I remembered I had already solved a problem in a one-liner, but on a different drawterm which ran on a Unix box miles away.

cpu% echo $wsys
/srv/rio.myname.1234
cpu% lc /srv/rio.*
rio.myname.1234		rio.myname.5678

So the other drawterm runs the rio mounted on /srv/rio.myname.5678. To get at the scrollback of a window displayed on a screen on a totally different machine:

cpu% mount /srv/rio.myname.5678 /n/wsys 1
cpu% cat /n/wsys/text 
[...lines of output...]
[...including the one-liner...]

Wed, 27 Jun 2007
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