rio is
Plan 9 from Bell Labs
Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system which originated from the Computing Science Research Center (CSRC) at Bell Labs in the mid-1980s and built on UNIX concepts first developed there in the late 1960s. Since 2000, Plan 9 has be ...
'
windowing system
In computing, a windowing system (or window system) is software that manages separately different parts of display screens. It is a type of graphical user interface (GUI) which implements the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) paradigm fo ...
. It is well known for making its window management transparent to the application. This allows running rio inside of another window manager.
History
rio is the latest in a long series of
graphical user interface
The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inst ...
s developed at
Bell Labs
Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984),
then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996)
and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007),
is an American industrial Research and development, research and scientific developm ...
, mostly developed by
Rob Pike
Robert "Rob" Pike (born 1956) is a Canadian programmer and author. He is best known for his work on the Go (programming language), Go programming language and at Bell Labs, where he was a member of the Unix team and was involved in the creation o ...
, the
concurrent window system, and the
Blit (which predated
X).
rio was a
complete rewrite of
8½
' (Italian title: , ) is a 1963 surrealist comedy-drama film directed and co-written (with Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano and Brunello Rondi) by Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini. The metafictional narrative centers on Guido Anselmi, played by M ...
in
Alef. Its main change was that it stopped parsing and rewriting graphical commands and let the client write pixels directly. This was done mainly for efficiency. As Alef disappeared due to being too difficult to maintain given the number of people working on Plan 9 at the time, rio was rewritten in
C. This was done using the Plan 9 thread library which was inspired by Alef and had most of its features, such as blocking channels for interthread and interprocess communication. Another important change, due more to the environment than to rio per se, is that rio supports full colour, using
alpha compositing
In computer graphics, alpha compositing or alpha blending is the process of combining one image with a background to create the appearance of partial or full transparency. It is often useful to render picture elements (pixels) in separate pas ...
, whereas 8½ uses
bitblt
Bit blit (also written BITBLT, BIT BLT, BitBLT, Bit BLT, Bit Blt etc., which stands for ''bit block transfer'') is a data operation commonly used in computer graphics in which several bitmaps are combined into one using a ''Truth_table#Binary_opera ...
operations.
Design concepts
Many of its features embody key Plan 9 design concepts:
* Each
window
A window is an opening in a wall, door, roof, or vehicle that allows the exchange of light and may also allow the passage of sound and sometimes air. Modern windows are usually glazed or covered in some other transparent or translucent mat ...
runs in its own private
namespace
In computing, a namespace is a set of signs (''names'') that are used to identify and refer to objects of various kinds. A namespace ensures that all of a given set of objects have unique names so that they can be easily identified.
Namespaces ...
.
* It exports a
file system interface to running applications. This interface is the same rio receives from the operating system, so rio can run inside a rio window without any special arrangements. Because the interface uses
9P, rio is
network transparent even if it doesn't include any
network
Network, networking and networked may refer to:
Science and technology
* Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects
* Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks
Mathematics ...
-aware code.
* Windows are treated as completely editable text.
See also
*
Plan 9 from Bell Labs
Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system which originated from the Computing Science Research Center (CSRC) at Bell Labs in the mid-1980s and built on UNIX concepts first developed there in the late 1960s. Since 2000, Plan 9 has be ...
- rio's native environment
*
Plan 9 from User Space
Plan 9 from User Space (also plan9port or p9p) is a port of many Plan 9 from Bell Labs libraries and applications to Unix-like operating systems. Currently it has been tested on a variety of operating systems including: Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, Net ...
- Includes a window manager that
emulates the rio user interface
*
Rob Pike
Robert "Rob" Pike (born 1956) is a Canadian programmer and author. He is best known for his work on the Go (programming language), Go programming language and at Bell Labs, where he was a member of the Unix team and was involved in the creation o ...
- The author of rio and 8½
*
Blit - A terminal developed at
Bell Labs
Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984),
then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996)
and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007),
is an American industrial Research and development, research and scientific developm ...
that pioneered some of the UI concepts used in Rio.
External links
Rio: Design of a Concurrent Window System by Rob Pike*
*
The 8½ paper- Describes rio's predecessor which had a very similar design
{{Rob Pike navbox
2002 software
Free software programmed in C
Free windowing systems
Plan 9 from Bell Labs