Badly discoverable? Sure. You can vastly improve the remembering part by picking appropriate mnemonics. The Plan 9 keyboard file is a nice start, I think.
It follows a set of rules so you don't have to remember a large number of sequences but can often guess the right one intuitively.
ASCII digraphs for mathematical operators give the corresponding operator, e.g., <= yields ≤.
Greek letters are given by an asterisk followed by a corresponding latin letter, e.g., *d yields δ.
https://github.com/9fans/plan9port/blob/master/lib/keyboard
https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/man/man7/keyboard.html
There's a program (mklatinkbd) to convert it to a format usable with X11.
In UnicodeMath – A Nearly Plain-Text Encoding of Mathematics (2016) [pdf]9fans
plan9port
C2016–2026
9fans / plan9port
plan9port
Plan 9 from User Space
22Distinct people
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1Explicit recommenders
2KGitHub stars
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Makefiles are underrated. The concept is so simple – it is basically a dependency graph with attached shell scripts – yet so powerful. Not just for building software, but also…
black_knight used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
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HN mentions by year23 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-08-15 20:18:15 UTC to 2026-07-13 16:35:50 UTC.
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| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
This is a port of many Plan 9 libraries and programs to Unix.
Installation
To install, run ./INSTALL. It builds mk and then uses mk to
run the rest of the installation.
For more details, see install(1), at install.txt in this directory
and at https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/man/man1/install.html.
Documentation
See https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/man/ for more documentation.
(Documentation is also in this tree, but you need to run
a successful install first. After that, "9 man 1 intro".)
Intro(1) contains a list of man pages that describe new features
or differences from Plan 9.
Helping out
If you'd like to help out, great!
If you port this code to other architectures, please share your changes
so others can benefit.
Git
You can use Git to keep your local copy up-to-date as we make
changes and fix bugs. See the git(1) man page here ("9 man git")
for details on using Git.
Status
Contact
Mailing list: https://groups.google.com/group/plan9port-dev
Issue tracker: https://github.com/9fans/plan9port/issues
Submitting changes: https://github.com/9fans/plan9port/pulls
Russ Cox rsc@swtch.com
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
4 sourcesI'm sorry, what? Golang didn't appropriate the term Rune in reference to Unicode. The term comes from Plan 9's UTF-8 handling library (libutf) which was written by ken and pike, who invented UTF-8. Rob Pike went on to write Go, which was heavily influenced by Plan9 C.
rune.c:2: "The authors of this software are Rob Pike and Ken Thompson."
https://github.com/9fans/plan9port/blob/master/src/lib9/utf/...
In BitBench – Visually dissect and analyze bit stringsI use 9term (from plan9port[0]) as my standard terminal emulator. It has no support for colours. Plan9port comes with a command, nobs, which strips ANSI colour from output. Setting PAGER=nobs and TERM=dumb takes care of a lot of the colour outputting.
9term also does not support a lot of other terminal features. Using it I’ve noticed that there are two kinds of terminal programs:
1. Programs that uses the terminal as a GUI.
2. Programs that can be composed with other programs.
I prefer a program in category 2, since I like scripting to automate my tasks.
[0]: https://github.com/9fans/plan9port
In Disabling ANSI color outputthis is how they did it somewhat later in plan 9, with macro's:
ARGBEGIN{
default:
usage();
case 'm':
m = ARGF();
break;
case 'p':
pflag = 1;
break;
}ARGEND
https://github.com/9fans/plan9port/blob/master/include/libc....
https://github.com/9fans/plan9port/blob/master/src/cmd/mkdir...
In How Old School C Programmers Process Arguments