rio is
Plan 9 from Bell Labs'
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 interfaces 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 scientific development company owned by mult ...
, mostly developed by
Rob Pike, 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 ...
in
Alef
Aleph (or alef or alif, transliterated ʾ) is the first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician , Hebrew , Aramaic , Syriac , Arabic ʾ and North Arabian 𐪑. It also appears as South Arabian 𐩱 and Ge'ez .
These lett ...
. 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 pa ...
, 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 ''boolean function''.
The ...
operations.
Design concepts
Many of its features embody key Plan 9 design concepts:
* Each
window runs in its own private
namespace.
* 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
Mathematic ...
-aware code.
* Windows are treated as completely editable text.
See also
*
Plan 9 from Bell Labs - 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, Ne ...
- Includes a window manager that
emulates the rio user interface
*
Rob Pike - 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 scientific development company owned by mult ...
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