inferno programmer's notebook

NAME lab 51 - plumbing from firefox NOTES I often want to copy and paste text from the firefox browser into my Acme session. Copy and paste isn't implemented for hosted Inferno. It could be implemented easily enough, but not in a general way for all hosted environments, and there might be more interesting ideas to explore especially when including plumber in the mix. To solve my particular problem, getting text from the browser to Acme, I created a bookmarklet that opens a window on a URL that I serve from my Inferno session. The URL http://localhost/magic/plumb is a shell script that calls the plumb command to open the query string in Acme. plumb -d edit -a action showdata -a filename /httpd/plumb $"msg >[2=1] I have a modified httpd that calls shell scripts and sets environment variables to the cgi data from the query string. In this case msg is a query parameter. I install a plumb bookmarket (drag it to toolbar), then I can select text in Firefox, click on t...

NAME lab 50 - structural expressions NOTES Sometimes I write some code but I'll let it sit for ages because I can't do the lab write-up for it. I think it's probably better to just throw it out there and get on with the next thing. This is one of those labs. Maybe I'll come back and edit it more if I end up using the tool. I've been reading again Rob Pike's Structural Regular Expressions paper. It suggests variations on existing tools (sort, grep, diff and awk) where applying structural expressions might make the tools more versatile or change their character entirely. Inferno is missing awk and though it can be run externally I still feel such a tool ought to exist within Inferno. Text manipulation, software tools, filters, regular expressions, pattern-action languages: these make up the core of what I think Inferno should be about. If there's a specific user I have in mind for Inferno it's me, and my main use for it is as a programming environmen...