HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

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 ...
' windowing system. 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 A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows user (computing), users to human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through Graphics, graphical icon (computing), icons and visual indicators such ...
s developed at
Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Murray Hill, New Jersey, the compa ...
, mostly developed by
Rob Pike Robert Pike (born 1956) is a Canadian programmer and author. He is best known for his work on the Go programming language while working at Google and the Plan 9 operating system while working at Bell Labs, where he was a member of the Unix t ...
, the concurrent window system, and the Blit (which predated X).


' was a window system developed for the
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 ...
operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...
by
Rob Pike Robert Pike (born 1956) is a Canadian programmer and author. He is best known for his work on the Go programming language while working at Google and the Plan 9 operating system while working at Bell Labs, where he was a member of the Unix t ...
. According to its documentation, the system has ''little graphical fanciness'', a ''fixed user interface'', and depends on a three-button mouse. Like much of the Plan 9 operating system, many operations work by reading and writing to special files. Because of the limitations stemming from its unusual implementation, has been completely rewritten into its successor rio in recent Plan 9 versions.


rio

rio was a complete rewrite of
''8½'' ( ) is a 1963 Italian avant-garde arthouse comedy-drama film co-written and directed by Federico Fellini. The metafictional narrative centers on famous Italian film director Guido Anselmi ( Marcello Mastroianni) who suffers from writer ...
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 pass ...
, whereas 8½ uses bitblt 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 ma ...
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 ...
- rio's native environment *
Plan 9 from User Space Plan 9 from User Space (also plan9port or p9p) is a Porting, 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, Fr ...
- Includes a window manager that emulates the rio user interface *
Rob Pike Robert Pike (born 1956) is a Canadian programmer and author. He is best known for his work on the Go programming language while working at Google and the Plan 9 operating system while working at Bell Labs, where he was a member of the Unix t ...
- The author of rio and 8½ * Blit - A terminal developed at
Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Murray Hill, New Jersey, the compa ...
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