The 9term Terminal Emulator

9term is an implementation for Unix of the terminal windows presented under 8½, the Plan 9 windowing system.

What 9term does

Using 9term you too will be able to use characters like those shown below on your screen and in your programs! Below is a snapshot of me displaying one of the example files that comes with the distribution on my terminal. This was done with a simple cat command. 9term is partially Unicode aware.

9term allows program output to be edited in-place and then resubmitted as further input. Commands may be also edited in-place before being executed. Further information is available from the manual page.

Other demonstration images include:

• A simple test file
• Key to The Pronunciation from the OED
• New Testament Greek: Mark 1:1-10 (the character metrics need to be adjusted but you get the idea)
• Runes available from the keyboard
• A display of some of the available characters.

The Availability of 9term

The 9term 1.6.3 distribution is available via ftp in ftp://ftp.cs.usyd.edu.au/matty/unicode/9term.1.6.3.tar.Z with a README file and a special bundle of fonts for use with libXg and 9term.

The libXg libraries necessary to compile 9term and the sam editor are available in ftp://netlib.att.com/netlib/research/sam.msg.Z which comes with its own README file.

A useful tool is tcs which converts between various character sets, e.g., ISO Latin 1 to UTF-2 (also known as UTF-FSS or UTF-8), or JIS to UTF-2. The package is available in ftp://plan9.att.com/plan9/unixsrc/tcs.shar.Z.