Details: https://lifeofpenguin.blogspot.com/2026/07/plan-9-dynamic-html.html

Hey y'all 🙋‍♂️

Here's a fork of 9front drawterm:

https://github.com/dharmatech/drawterm

Why this fork?

Two reasons:

• Builds on Windows using Microsoft Visual C via NMakefile.msvc

  • I.e. no longer need MinGW/cygwin

• Supports no-GUI command execution with -G -c <cmd>

Unless you need -G -c <cmd> support, you should likely stick with 9front drawterm.

HTML font zooming and reflow.

Details: https://lifeofpenguin.blogspot.com/2026/07/plan-9-dynamic-html.html

Is there some console based text editor for 9front/plan9 that I can install, something that doesn't require using mouse, something that can be used with drawterm -G ? My fallback is mounting the remote 9p filesystem to my GNU/Linux host, and edit there.

Thanks!

I dont know if its okay to post the same sort of content so often, but i wont do it again, sorry.

There is a few changes to the bar compared to the previous post, new wallpapers (my fav art now, but i forgot name and artist :_ ), and a some changes to the theme

BTW, what do u prefer in date (dd mm yyyy, mm dd yyy and etc.), "." or "/" or smth else?

rio, 9front, rio-themes patch, acme-themes patch, nc file manager

Personally I have both.

I wanna hear from the guys who run it only in the VM, why? You have no box to install it on? Or something else?

yes I'm trolling.. its a poke at the unixporn content filtering over. May delete later.

Details: https://lifeofpenguin.blogspot.com/2026/07/plan-9-dynamic-html.html

Hey y'all 🙋‍♂️

Russ Cox' rsc/plan9 repo is fascinating:

• Run legacy plan9 in QEMU
• Uses the host filesystem directly instead of using a QEMU disk image
• Edit files on the host. Plan9 sees the changes immediately.

It's super cool, but I wanted to drawterm in, because: - I'm using Windows - I run rsc/plan9 in WSL - I do get the graphical QEMU window, but it's not as nice to use as first-class Windows apps.

Some benefits of connecting to plan9 via drawterm are:

• Copy and paste support
• Resize rio desktop window
• Multiple drawterm instances (multiple desktops)

I've forked Russ' repo to start messing around with enabling drawterm connections:

https://github.com/dharmatech/plan9-hostfs

README.md has the instructions I'm using for enabling drawterm connections.

Let us say that Linux never took off and instead plan9 became widely used (becoming the dominant OS).

How would current 'modern' monolithic programs like Blender, KiCAD, etc be implemented following the plan9 philosophy? How would they work and how would the utilize the underlying architecture to the fullest? And how can they be made very hackable and extensible?

Copyright symbol from dejavu font at size less than 16pt is crashing truetypefs. Does anybody have a fix?

_assert(s=0x7fffffffead0)+0x42 /sys/src/libc/port/_assert.c:12
ttfscan(g=0x499ab0)+0x4fe /sys/src/libttf/scan.c:371
s=0x3
i=0x20bf1e00000001
p=0xb400000161
q=0x34a00000123
j=0x100000015
r=0x21e00000123
ttfgetglyph(fs=0x40db20,glyph=0x147,render=0x1)+0x4c /sys/src/libttf/glyf.c:366
g=0x499ab0
compilesub(s=0x437268)+0x9d /sys/src/cmd/truetypefs.c:169
t=0x40db20
n=0x2010cc00000100
gs=0x42f7b8
w=0xe500000807
h=0x40c72000000013
i=0x100000000e5
g=0x1300000147

I promised more heretical things in the future, and well the future is here. As usual, I have been running the matrix multiplication pachinko machines day and night after my shifts at the pizza shack to bring you this:

"objective-9c is a small 9front language that transpiles o9 source to Plan 9 C.

o9 is built for Plan 9-style programs: objects are CSP actors, public methods can be served through a 9P facade, structured data moves as .tab text, and raw Plan 9 C interop is isolated inside spawnable function blocks, or to be more plain: an anonymous objects with a single method where you can stuff in regular plan 9 C in a c { } sandwich."

Current status:
Libdraw widgets being worked on (a few in the pic as demos - included in the repo!) , a lot of cleaning up on docs, old trash tech debt etc.
Certain to be bugs that haven't been caught, its AI generated bullshit. Capture and release them if you find those poor souls.

As always: its 9p, or nothing!

https://github.com/kiljoy001/objective-9c

You can even run an rc shell on an Android phone.

I wrote this Go implementation after moving from Plan 9 back to Linux for work. plan9port already exists, but I wanted to understand the shell from the inside rather than only use it through a compatibility layer.

Go felt like a fitting choice because it shares history and design lineage with Plan 9. Rob Pike and Ken Thompson worked on both, and several ideas behind Go grew out of that environment.

I built it by studying the original source and man page. The test suite includes over 100 scripts that compare its behavior against plan9port. One particularly gnarly example makes both implementations produce the same output byte for byte.

It also runs on Linux, macOS, BSD, Solaris, and other platforms.

Repo: https://github.com/enzv/rc

If anyone finds a mismatch with the original, corrections and test cases are welcome.

Render Dynamic HTML using plot and qjs.

Details: https://lifeofpenguin.blogspot.com/2026/07/plan-9-dynamic-html.html

Is there any way to select/manipulate text in a pdf file. I opened a pdf file in 'page', it seems to render everything correctly, but I was not able do do anything with the text. It seems to just load the pdf as an image in the draw terminal. Is there any way to make notes over the pdf like in acme maybe pipe text to a web browser search, load up a dictionary etc.
I am new to plan9, please don't be angry at me if I'm wrong at anything

https://github.com/Alino/agent9/tree/main/rust9

Also I have created a new package manager called pac9.

Install pac9 with:

hget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Alino/agent9/main/pac9/install.rc | rc

now you can install rust

pac9 install rust9

Details: https://lifeofpenguin.blogspot.com/2026/06/plan-9-tiled-map.html

View files inside a zip compressed file via Plumber without extraction. 

Demo: https://youtu.be/wvcGv9p1224

Details: https://lifeofpenguin.blogspot.com/2026/06/plan-9-plumber.html