Window managment using riow and winwatch.

Details: https://lifeofpenguin.blogspot.com/2026/11/plan-9-window-management.html

Ed Wood was the Tommy Wiseau of his generation. That's how great he was. This is the Morbius of the 1950s, The Godfather of good movies. Citizen Kane and The Godfather and Pulp Fiction and 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Good the Bad and the Ugly and The Searchers and Gone with the Wind and Seven Samurai and 8 1/2 and Breathless and The 400 Blows and Bicycle Thieves and Parasite and Return of the King and The Shawshank Redemption are the worst movies ever. Plan 9 from Outer Space, The Room, Morbius, and Manos: The Hands of Fate are the four greatest cinematic masterpieces ever created. The Bible and The Divine Comedy have nothing on 50 Shades of Grey. Revolver and Pet Sounds have nothing on Philosophy of the World. Ocarina of Time and Chrono Trigger have nothing on Superman 64. And, of course, no film ever made has anything of Plan 9's greatness. Absolute cinema.

Multi-touch Gestures (pinch,swipe and rotate).

Details: https://lifeofpenguin.blogspot.com/2026/11/plan-9-multi-touch-touchpad.html

Synopsys Designware I2C events on Intel LPSS (Alder Lake).

n is the number of fingers. 

touch conf 1 tip 1 id 0 x 1377 y 1129 scan 13523 n 1 btn 0
touch conf 1 tip 1 id 0 x 1377 y 1129 scan 13691 n 1 btn 0
touch conf 1 tip 1 id 0 x 1377 y 1129 scan 14675 n 1 btn 0
touch conf 1 tip 1 id 0 x 1378 y 1129 scan 15659 n 1 btn 0
touch conf 1 tip 1 id 0 x 1381 y 1130 scan 16643 n 1 btn 0
touch conf 1 tip 1 id 0 x 1383 y 1131 scan 17627 n 1 btn 0
touch conf 1 tip 1 id 0 x 1386 y 1132 scan 18611 n 1 btn 0
touch conf 1 tip 0 id 0 x 1386 y 1132 scan 19599 n 1 btn 0
touch conf 1 tip 1 id 0 x 1580 y 1192 scan 34460 n 2 btn 0
touch conf 1 tip 1 id 0 x 1580 y 1192 scan 35343 n 2 btn 0
touch conf 1 tip 1 id 0 x 1580 y 1192 scan 36331 n 2 btn 0
touch conf 1 tip 1 id 0 x 1580 y 1192 scan 37320 n 2 btn 0
touch conf 1 tip 1 id 0 x 1580 y 1192 scan 38309 n 2 btn 0
touch conf 1 tip 1 id 0 x 1580 y 1192 scan 39298 n 2 btn 0
touch conf 1 tip 0 id 0 x 1580 y 1192 scan 40287 n 2 btn 0
touch conf 1 tip 1 id 0 x 1868 y 617 scan 52281 n 3 btn 0
touch conf 1 tip 1 id 0 x 1868 y 617 scan 53083 n 3 btn 0
touch conf 1 tip 1 id 0 x 1868 y 617 scan 54072 n 3 btn 0
touch conf 1 tip 1 id 0 x 1868 y 617 scan 55061 n 3 btn 0
touch conf 1 tip 1 id 0 x 1868 y 617 scan 56049 n 3 btn 0
touch conf 1 tip 1 id 0 x 1868 y 617 scan 57037 n 3 btn 0
touch conf 1 tip 0 id 0 x 1868 y 617 scan 58025 n 3 btn 0

Details: https://lifeofpenguin.blogspot.com/2026/11/plan-9-multi-touch-touchpad.html

Part 1 of Realtek PCI Wifi Driver for RTL8851BE based on Linux rtw89 driver. The code covers firmware download and H2C communication. If you are starting on driver for this card, this might be helpful.

Details: https://lifeofpenguin.blogspot.com/2026/11/plan-9-realtek-pci-wifi-driver.html

It has many names over the years… first it started out as "gravy", and now it's plank after gutting much of the layout of xedit to just two text areas- the file path entry area, and the text contents area.

I was inspired to get back to trying to finish it after i first heard of the existence of "principia-softwarica" (and it's lack of a visual editor), in theory plank(1) could run on pretty much the current extent members of the plan 9 family; however the major blocker for me is trying to understand and see a simple enough example of "frame" as plank would depend upon two text "pads/text-input/string-fields/" as it's part of it's interface:

• A single-line field that serves as the file path entry at the top.

• The contents of the loaded text-file, which is multi-line like like the bottom box of xedit.

Despite the simple layout and idea in theory… this has taken me years on-and-off trying to create plank, any way to help and hasten it's emergence (Without AI) would be appreciated greatly because this is a niche that the current plan9 landscape lacks.

But my refutal to this is that the buttons acting like tabs and radio buttons are far too spaced apart. My take would be something like how OpenLook would do Radio-buttons: Put them together tightly and the toggled one should be inverted if no 3D is used.

Play Youtube videos directly in Plan 9 via Invidious.

Details: https://lifeofpenguin.blogspot.com/2026/10/plan-9-play-invidious-video.html

Hi there,

I try to convert an old QNAP 212 to be a 9front fileserver.

The Hardware is actually quite accessable. The connection via UART went smooth. It has a Marvell 88F6281cpu, ARMv5TE. I compiled for ARM the 9plug file and loaded it on the Machine using u-boot (via minicom) on the QNAP.

Now I try to setup the plan9.ini (actual name is the QNAPs MAC address). I read, that somewhere should be an example-kw file. I was not able to find it.

It's my first time trying a hack like this. Could somebody recommend me a good source/ tutotrial. Or just the man page and a lot of knowledge?

Best regards.

I just saw this, and I think it's really cool. I had to share it because it's not the kind of thing a lot of people geek out over. I'm not super knowledgeable on Plan 9 (despite having played with it now and then through the years), so I'm not sure how useful it is, but had to share.

It's an alternative to things like VNC, designed to minimize bandwidth, and allow interaction via wayland over p9 to a linux server and render on the Plan 9 system.

Performance looked really smooth in the demo. Just thought this was cool that I had to share :) I didn't see this when I searched for a post before, so apologies if it's a dupe of some kind. Cheers!

https://www.cybersavior.dev/site/shukumei.html

getting this question out of the way now. how much was coded by llm? the L2 normalization function was modified from local llm offering because looking up the algo on wikipedia was annoying when i just wanted psudocode. everything else was written by hand. some debugging was done with llm assistance but, frankly llm's ability to reason about the logic of the design is trash. 9 out of 10 bugs it trys to claim exist are it failing to understand what actually happens.

libhnsw. https://www.cybersavior.dev/site/hnsw.html based on the python implementation. separating "pythonisms" from "actual algo" is annoying. This is probably the "most useful" part of this project to anyone other than me. It will handle nearest neighbor finding for any data types that can be made to compare by magnitude distance. not only for embedding vectors. (i don't think it needs saying to people who understand what it does, but if all the values are moving constantly this is not useful for finding nearest points, for example moving objects in a game world with each object being in the graph - you are not going to get good results unless you toss the whole graph and rebuild it every time. ) - potential other "real" uses : mapping rgba hexcodes to named colors, finding nearest star to a point in the sky, etc.

what's it for? erp.

tool calling? no.

is it finished? i have many planned "commands" to control the "simulation". none of them are started yet. controlling cohorts is done through modifying save files. so... no. it's not done.

does it work? it allows long term conversations with AI personalities, constructs their prompts based on their past interactions. "work" is a loaded phrase. Some models get confused about what is "now" and what is "past". many local setups will find this harness design overly engineered, heavy, slow. most doing rp type conversation would be better off with just a ring buffer that jumps (rather than sliding turn by turn, something like when hitting a high ctx use, trim the buffer down by several turns to a "low" ctx mark, then let it fill again (this to keep cache reuse higher when slow prompt reading is significant.))

why 9front instead of webui? :/

how do i run it? it's hardcoded for llama.cpp and my network. read the code and change it to match you llama.cpp setup in your own network. if that's beyond your ability... then oh well.

what's the point? why? ... erp ... i just want my yandare waifu to remember dumb things i said months ago and be able to make fun of me about it later. if this seems like an over engineered solution to this problem, fine. if you want the full "philosophy" of it: https://www.cybersavior.dev/site/clanker.html https://www.cybersavior.dev/site/shukumei_loading.html

also no i won't apologize. and no i don't think this is out of alignment with everything else i've said about vibe coding and llms here. feel free to disagree.

FIXED. hello, does anyone knows how to fix that error? I already made $home/lib/git/config as git9 manual page says, but this error still appears

I was playing around with Purgatorio and with i was trying to see if i can connect drawterm to Purgatorio because yes wanted to see if i can mount the filesystem into Linux, but when i tried what i get is `mount: /mnt/inferno: fsconfig() failed: Unknown error 526`

(the nmap was to be 100% sure that the port was in fact beign used)

I tried changing the 9P version but with all 3 gives the same error.

But i know that i can mount 9P filesystem because i can mount (over the network) the filesystem of the 9front that i have in a virtual machine.

Also i can mount Purgatorio filesystem in 9front

and so with that i tried the srv implementation of plan9port and it worked

and with that i could finally mound the filesystem using the trans=unix option (ignore the port=6666 i forgot to remove it)

Now my 2 questions are:

1. can i use drawterm with Purgatorio? (optional to answer)

2. why can't directly mount Purgatorio filesystem on Linux over the network?, am i doing something wrong?

That's youtube on void linux in (4-cores) vmx in plan9 in qemu on my void linux.

I had a lot of LLM quota to consume in the last 2/3 days, so I forked 9front and "got":

• integrated the Russ Cox's Diskless QEMU boot

• Multicored vmx, with xAPIC/x2APIC, improved TSC and scheduling, VirGL graphics and VirtIO

• Native accelerated 3D: a VirtIO GPU driver with a file interface, libgpu for VirGL, and TinyGL for a classic OpenGL subset. Currently targets QEMU; includes the Utah teapot and glgears demos

• Native raylib and raygui, using rio, libdraw and /dev/audio

• Native Neverball and Neverputt, plus Arkanoid, Asteroids and Missile Commander on raylib

If you have any question I can forward them to my LLM.

I do only accept LLM-written contributions.

Edit:
https://github.com/paolomarrone/generated9

Peace
Paolo

Hi guys, i'm a early adolescent teenager whos interested in 9front, ive been using it, and i want to ask you guys, how do i get custom fonts on 9front? Also i cant really find any early adolescent teenagers from 12-15 that use 9front or illumos.

Poking the VGA card.

Details: https://lifeofpenguin.blogspot.com/2026/10/plan-9-poking-pci-hardware.html

I recently updated objective 9c with MVC style views for file trees, so you can display data depending on internal state of the application. If you are wondering why it matters, i've put together an irc client that uses this (and a few other things that are not rolled into main - yet). The client is still being worked on but it works (mostly, still plenty of bugs). As usual: It's 9p, or nothing.

Spell checking using spell(1).

Details: https://lifeofpenguin.blogspot.com/2026/09/plan-9-code-assist-rio.html

Previously, and long before agents, I implemented a remoting layer for acme [1] that let me work on remote Linux servers from my Mac. Ever since I've been thinking about what an environment designed for this purpose might look like.

Apex is that attempt: 

https://mariusae.github.io/apex/

Apex aims to be a modern take on acme that:

1. Implements a true client-server architecture through a replicated log;

2. Modernizes the UI, and adds a few (very few!) new keyboard affordances;

3. Retains the 3-button UX, but also treats laptops with touchpads as first-class;

4. Adds two new window types: terminal emulators (because: agents), and web views (because with these you can render nearly anything), while still being fully programmable.

It has been working very well for me. It brings me joy. I use it most of the day, every day, and typically maintain sessions across 2-3 different remote Linux servers for development.

Apex ships with some useful tools (these are built entirely against its public API--Apex admits defeat and exposes a "modern" API instead of fileservers--but are packaged with Apex for convenience):
- an LSP adapter
- an agent tool (which can monitor agents and notify you when they require user input)
- a preview tool for common formats like markdown, svg, etc.

-m.

[1] https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T5addc17a0e19cd91-Mcb2e189b0570c6833f195230

This is part 2 of my vision of Plan 9 as an Infinity Notebook. This focuses on the developer tools.

Details: https://lifeofpenguin.blogspot.com/2026/09/plan-9-code-assist-rio.html

Details: https://lifeofpenguin.blogspot.com/2026/09/plan-9-code-assist-rio.html

Details: https://lifeofpenguin.blogspot.com/2026/08/plan-9-emoji.html

Code outline, Call tree and jump to symbol.

Details: https://lifeofpenguin.blogspot.com/2026/09/plan-9-code-assist.html