Author Archives: bjornstahl

This article introduces the first release of ‘Lash#Cat9’, a different kind of command-line shell. A big change is that it is communicating with the display server directly, instead of being restricted and filtered by a terminal emulator. The source code … Continue reading →

This release should put us at about half way through the planned work for the networking focus set of releases (0.6.x), a scope roughly defined by the article on A12: Advancing network transparency on the desktop and the one on … Continue reading →

This article continues the long-lost series on how to migrate away from terminal protocols as the main building block for command-line and text-dominant user interfaces. The previous ones (Chasing the dream of a terminal-free CLI (frustration/idea, 2016) and Dawn of … Continue reading →

Time for another fairly beefy Arcan release. For those thinking in semantic versioning still surprised at the change-set versus version number here (‘just a minor update?’) do recall that as per the roadmap, disregarding the optimistic timeline, we work with … Continue reading →

Time to continue to explain what Arcan actually “is” on a higher level. Previous articles have invited the comparison to Xorg ( part1, part2 ). Another possibility would have been Plan9, but Xorg was also a better fit also for … Continue reading →

Now for something completely different. In the spiritual vein of One Night in Rio: Vacation photos from Plan9 and AWK for multimedia, here is a tool that is the link that ties almost all the projects within the Arcan umbrella … Continue reading →

Hot on the heels of the recent Arcan release, it is also time for a release to our reference desktop environment ‘Durden‘. To refresh memory somewhat, the closest valid comparison is probably the venerable AwesomeWM – but there is quite … Continue reading →

This is the follow-up to the ‘Arcan versus Xorg: approaching feature parity’ article which is recommended reading if you have not done so already.  After that article, there was only one (and a half) real feature left to safely claim … Continue reading →

This time around, the changes are big enough across the board that the sub-projects will get individual posts instead of being clumped together, and that will become a recurring theme as the progress cadence becomes less and less interlocked. We … Continue reading →

This article is is the main course to the appetiser that was The X Network Transparency Myth (2018). In it, we will go through how the pieces in the Arcan ecosystem tie together to advance the idea of network transparency … Continue reading →