Plan 9 From User Space

Plan 9 From User Space is a cool tool that brings most of the Plan 9 software build environment right over to Unix. It’s pretty neat how it tries to work nicely with Unix by following its rules for things like printf verbs and system headers.

What Makes Plan 9 Unique?

This port really aims to keep the Plan 9 build vibe alive. It does this by providing files like u.h and libc.h, and it even changes some tokens like open, dup, and accept. Why? To make sure everything behaves more like Plan 9 would expect! While this might make things a bit trickier and less friendly for Unix users, the upside is that you can usually compile Plan 9 programs without needing to change much at all.

A Bit of History

Plan 9 From User Space comes from the original Plan 9 from Bell Labs, and it wouldn’t be here without all the hard work from the amazing Plan 9 team over the years.

Key Contributors

Rob Pike was one of the brains behind getting libdraw to work with X11 ages ago as part of drawterm, plus he pushed for improvements in Mac OS X too. He always has great ideas on how to tidy up modern Unix systems.

Then there’s William Josephson, who worked on troff(1) alongside Taj Khattra and helped out with various support programs. He also played a big role in cleaning up thread libraries and porting some apps.

Andrey Mirtchovski and Axel Belinfante have tackled tricky X11 issues while fine-tuning rio(1). Axel has a knack for finding bugs in SunOS ports! Latchesar Ionkov fixed up lots of tricky bugs too, including getting factotum(4) running smoothly.

A Team Effort

The best part? Many others have chipped in by porting programs, filing bug reports, sending patches, and helping get plan9port working on different systems!

A Nod to Bigelow & Holmes

This project even got help from Bigelow & Holmes, Inc., who created screen fonts found in luc, lucm, lucsans, and pelm directories. They were kind enough to let us share these fonts with plan9port!

What's New?

What's New: Almost everything has been refreshed since our last update! We’ve got a brand new venti backup system along with a fresh upas/fs mailbox interface. One exciting highlight is that we now feature a native GUI for OS X!