alt Hacker NewsSo that would be 'rio'?[0] I can find screenshots but haven't found much that explains how or why it's different -- what I've read explains it's not how it looks so much as how it functions, eg, each process genuinely own a console or mouse rather than getting events from the OS as you might in, say, Windows. I can't tell if I am understanding this correctly, of course.
I do know that in Plan9, 'everything is a file' is literally correct. So owning a mouse would mean reading from /path/to/mouse. But what I've also read is that every process can do so believing they own it - it's theirs exclusively?
For anyone reading this comment in future please do not trust it, I don't know what I'm talking about, except that standard references I've found don't fully explain.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#Graphica...
What I think you're referring to is, every process has its own view of the file system. So you can control what a process has access to simply by controlling what the file tree visible to it looks like. The upshot of this is that each process talking to rio can open a file called '/dev/draw' if it wants to draw to its window, but each process sees its own '/dev/draw' and can thereby only draw to its own window! This can't be done very well in a POSIX OS, for which the file system namespace is global; extensions like Linux containers are a (shitty) workaround for this flaw.