Tech insights

 UEFI ( Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) provides a quick way to set up a Plan 9 terminal  on modern hardware .  EFI System Partition (ESP) is a FAT32 partition. You should be able to modify it in most of the operating systems.     Run mk in \sys\src\boot\efi . aux/aout2efi converts an a.out file to an EFI executable. Copy over the files bootx64.efi, 9pc64, plan9.ini  (for x86_64 hardware) to \EFI\plan9\ directory in the ESP. If you want it be the default OS , you can create a symlink \EFI\boot to \EFI\plan9. Remember to include the full path to the kernel in plan9.ini. bootfile=\EFI\plan9\9pc64       When bootx64.efi fails to find the bootfile (e.g. kernel is missing, plan9.ini is missing or path is incorrect), you can provide the arguments at > prompt   followed by a boot command . You can use EFI shell or efibootmgr on Linux to modify the EFI entries that are displayed during boot.   Test in QEMU Before running ...

  Compile and run Tinylisp in under 2 minutes on Plan 9 ( 9front ). Both are modified versions.   Code https://gitlab.com/atamariya/tinylisp (plan9 branch) https://gitlab.com/atamariya/plan9front (dev branch)    

  Plan 9 is an Operating System (OS) from Bell Labs which is a successor to UNIX. It builds on the learnings from the previous Operating systems. Network computing and graphics is an integral part of the OS rather than an afterthought. It is modular and portable - it comes with a cross compiler . It is available, under MIT License , which anybody can use, learn and tweak. Features Everything is a file. Singular Grid: All the computers running Plan 9 OS and connected together act like a singular grid. So there's no need for remote access solutions like VNC or RDP. This cool video shows a small glimpse of the possibilities. Process Isolation: Processes run within their own namespaces and are isolated from each other. So you can run rio (the window manager) within rio. Applications like Browsers don't need complicated sandboxing. And a crashing program is unlikely to bring down the OS. No DLL Hell : Binaries are always statically linked. So there's no DLL hell and there...

  Plan 9 Operating System uses 9p protocol for file access. This is an Elisp implementation of the protocol. Plan 9 ( 9front distribution) is running in QEMU with NAT networking. Local port 12564 is forwarded to 9fs service port 564 in the virtual machine.   Code https://gitlab.com/atamariya/emacs/-/blob/dev/lisp/net/plan9.el   Troubleshooting Plan 9 connection Ensure you are booting with  -a tcp!*!564  parameters. (Tip: You can add these to your /n/9fat/plan9.ini) Ensure you have configured the network interface   ip/ipconfig   Ensure you have an IP address  cat /net/ndb  Ensure you are running cpu+auth server  cpurc  (Optional) Start graphics mode  screenrc   (Optional) Start window manager  rio   (Optional) List open connections  netstat    (Optional) Monitor network traffic  snoopy   (Optional) Debug authentication  auth/debug  (Optional)...

  Quick visualization tool for Binary data using C header definition. Semantic parses the C header file and generates a type definition. The type definition is passed to bindat-unpack along with the binary data. The result is displayed using speedbar . ;; Note: The command works on the binary data in the current buffer.   M-x hexl-form   (hexl-form)      The image shows the example included in the commentary section of bindat.el .   Conversions (format "%02X" 255) ;; => "FF" (string-to-number "FF" 16) ;; => 255   ;; Little endian unpacking (let* ((bindat-raw [1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8])           (bindat-idx 0))   (bindat--unpack-u64r))   ;; Little endian packing (let* ((bindat-raw [0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0])           (bindat-idx 0))   (bindat--pack-u64r #x0102030405060708)   bindat-raw)      Insert Binary Data Emacs creates a multibyte buffer ...

Emacs at its core is a Lisp interpreter written in C. If you are an Emacs developer, this means you often need to jump between C and Lisp programming languages. CEDET is capable of maintaining project-wide tag database and hence allows the user to seamlessly jump across the definitions in either C or Lisp.    Demo: Jump to definition across Lisp and C (including pre-processor) using CEDET . Note: Emacs provides necessary tools to make development easier.  find-function will also do the job. However, this article is about CEDET. Another useful application is when you are editing an HTML which usually entails editing HTML, CSS and JS. Setup instructions are here: https://lifeofpenguin.blogspot.com/2021/04/gnu-emacs-as-lightweight-ide.html

Emacs Font is wider than other applications. Most people don't notice the difference. If you can perceive it, you are not hallucinating. This can be attributed to the following: Points per inch #ifndef HAVE_ANDROID /* Number of pt per inch (from the TeXbook).  */ #define PT_PER_INCH 72.27 #else /* Android uses this value instead to compensate for different device    dimensions.  */ #define PT_PER_INCH 160.00 #endif    Emacs definition is larger than the standard definition . The DTP point is defined as 1⁄72 of an inch.  Round-off error Emacs definition : /* Return a pixel size (integer) corresponding to POINT size (double)    on resolution DPI.  */ #define POINT_TO_PIXEL(POINT, DPI) ((POINT) * (DPI) / PT_PER_INCH + 0.5) /* Return a point size corresponding to POINT size (integer)    on resolution DPI.  Note that though point size is a double, we expect    it to be rounded to an int, so we add 0.5 here.  If ...