From what I can read on wikipedia, both acme and sam are mouse-centered. This is a major philosophical change compared to vim, while my understanding is that Plan 9 is a pure expression of the ideas underlying Unix ("Unix without the hacks").

> 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 "").

I'm afraid " and "" have both defeated my google-fu. Would you mind enlightening me about them?

> This makes no sense, Plan 9 have private namespaces which can do many things, including everything symlinks do.

I see. From what I read, that's certainly a much more powerful and cleaner abstraction than symlinks.

> 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 sounds reasonable. Anyway, given the limited hardware support, I suppose a VM is the way to go.