inferno programmer's notebook

NAME lab 70 - dict NOTES I ported Plan 9's dict to Inferno. At the moment it works with the Project Gutenberg dictionary and Roget's Thesaurus. Of course, since I'm an acme fan, I also ported adict to browse the dictionaries in acme. I've been looking to collect plain text databases that would fill a small portable 60GB drive. Then use acme as a plain text browser. When I've thought about Inferno as a system I've paid too much attention to the code and not to the data it might work on. Collecting databases is an attempt to broaden my view. Two databases to start with are Wikipedia (8GB uncompressed not including images) and the whole of Project Gutenberg (4GB compressed). I've started working on getting a local copy of wikipedia to display in acme using dict. I got this working for a small subset of wikipedia, the first 1GB, just to try things out. It works well enough that I'm now working on the complete archive.

NAME lab 69 - menuhit NOTES After removing Tk I still needed some menu functionality. If you look carefully at the picture in my last post you'll see the little green menu! I ported menuhit from plan9 and made it a module in inferno. I've used it in a few wm commands checked into svn. Because I'm Tk-less I don't have the tk toolbar so menuhit, like rio, is the way of controlling window operations, basic stuff like exiting from clock. Why no Tk? I didn't do this because I hated Tk and the programming interface. But I didn't like the way it looked. I use acme-sac the whole time so I essentially stoped using an Tk based commands. Also, I thought there's no way I'd ever give an end-user an application that used Tk. So I removed it just to see what would happen next. The most immediate consequence is a lurch towards rio like interface. But I don't think that's the end state. I'm also looking at the browser as an end-user interface...

NAME lab 68 - stand alone charon NOTES I've definitely got behind in blogging my Inferno work. And it's not that I haven't been doing anything. I'm just not putting in the effort to write stuff up. Salva has been carrying the ball and thanks to him for the last few posts. I'm going to try posting more regularly but smaller things. A lot of my recent work has been going into acme-sac. I've checked code into svn at code.google.com. If my posts describe work I've checked in there I won't include the files as part of the blog. Today's post is a pretty picture. The story is I removed Tk from acme-sac and then worked through the consequences. One of them was to get charon working without Tk, which turned out to be not that hard. Whereas Acme is an interface for programmers, I think this is a great interface for end users.