Plan 9 has acme and sam. There's also a vim port, but give Rob Pike's editors a chance. The relation between Unix and Plan 9 is the same as the relation between vim and sam.
> shell history
There's terminal (not shell) history, check out the " and "" scripts. Again, things are different in Plan 9. There's no point in doing the same stuff again. The Plan 9 mechanism is an emergent property of its design (it doesn't require special code in shells), and it's scriptable (again, see " and "").
> symlinks
This makes no sense, Plan 9 have private namespaces which can do many things, including everything symlinks do.
> decent browser
The browser is probably the biggest gripe for more people. You can run a semi-recent Opera in linuxemu. I believe it wouldn't be too hard to update linuxemu so you could run a recent firefox or chromium, however nobody did the work so far. Personally, when I use Plan 9, I use it to do things I can't do in Unix, so I don't spend any effort that would enable me to do things I do in Unix. For browsing I use a mac.
This, along with hardware support, is why I don't run Plan 9 as my only OS. Porting a modern browser to Plan 9 would be incredibly painful, and I believe the codebase of Chromium or Firefox is larger than Plan 9 itself these days!
> vim
Someone actually ported vim, and it's pretty easy to install from contrib.
> symlinks
These are a deliberate omission; the ability to rearrange the filesystem with bind doesn't correspond exactly to symlinks since it's done as a property of the current namespace rather than stored in the filesystem, but with the idioms that are built around bind, I've never missed symlinks at all.
Sorry for going into defensive-weenie mode and attacking your positive post!
if you want to keep it run
tail -f /dev/text >> /home/shell_history
in your login
The shell doesn't have fancy nonsense because fancy nonsense doesn't belong in the shell it belongs in your user environment.
Personally in 15 years of using plan9 I have never ever once wished for shell history.
I used plan9 as my primary desktop for about 10 years. As I would always respond, a Formula 1 car doesn't have an ashtray.
