The standard set up for a Plan 9 aficionado here seems to be a Mac or Linux machine running Plan 9 from User Space to get at sam, acme, and the other tools. Rob, Ken, Dave, and I use Macs as our desktop machines, but we're a bit of an exception. Most Google engineers use Linux machines, and I know of quite a few ex-Bell Labs people who are happy to be using sam or acme on those machines. My own setup is two screens. The first is a standard Mac desktop with non-Plan 9 apps and a handful of 9terms, and the second is a full-screen acme for getting work done. On Linux I do the same but the first screen is a Linux desktop running rio (formerly dhog's 8½).
More broadly, every few months I tend to get an email from someone who is happy to have just discovered that sam is still maintained and available for modern systems. A lot of the time these are people who only used sam on Unix, never on Plan 9. The plan9port.tgz file was downloaded from 2,522 unique IP addresses in 2009, which I suspect is many more than Plan 9 itself. In that sense, it's really nice to see the tools getting a much wider exposure than they used to. I haven't logged into a real Plan 9 system in many years, but I use 9vx occasionally when I want to remind myself how a real Plan 9 tool worked. It's always nice to be back, however briefly. Russ
