Introduction

Riox is a modified version of the Plan 9 window manager, rio.

The added features include :-

• Transient windows, which are linked to an owning window, and always stay above it. When the owner is hidden or unhidden, so is the transient window.
• Window layering, so that windows may be kept above or below other windows.
• Window maximum and minimum sizes.
• Keyboard and mouse grabbing.
• Command line history in text windows.
• Attributed text in text windows (colours, underline, italics etc).
• A simple logging facility, to capture all data output to a console window.

Riox can be run from within an individual window, or on the root window, by simply editing your profile file so that riox is run at startup, rather than rio. In the former case, you can pass the -x option to riox, to provide an “Exit” menu option.

Mouse bindings

By default, riox uses an alternative set of mouse bindings and menu configurations, which are intended to be more in line with usage on contemporary user interfaces :-

• The edges of a window are used to move, rather than resize, a window. Only the corners are used to resize.
• Right-clicking on a window frame brings up a context menu for the window (on rio, this is used to move the window).
• Right-clicking on a text window brings up the text context menu for that window (on rio, the middle button does this).
• Middle-clicking on a text window appends the selected text to the end of the window, adds a space, and moves the cursor to the end.
• Right-clicking on a blank portion of screen brings up a menu allowing a new window to be created, as well as a list of all windows, so that hidden windows may be restored. Hidden windows have their names prefixed with an “H”, and the current window is prefixed with a “*”. (rio has a similar menu on right clicking, but only shows hidden windows).

The conventional rio bindings can be used by starting riox with the -c option. However, this means some features are not available, namely the “Close”, “Keep above” and “Keep below” menu items, and the middle button text append feature.

Command line history and editing

• Up and down keys recall history items (use page up and page down to move up and down in the text buffer instead).

• View the history by viewing the file hist in the window directory, eg

  cat /mnt/wsys/hist

• Goto a particular history number with ^P typed after the number, eg

  % 25^P

• Search for a history item by typing ^R (backward) or ^T (forward) after a string prefix, eg

  % cat^R

  will search backwards for the next history item beginning with cat.

• ^Y deletes the character to the right of the cursor.

• Pressing enter in the middle of the current edited line doesn’t split that line. So if we have

  % ls -l /tmp

  and the cursor is just before the /, then pressing return will send the whole line; on rio it would send the ls -l and put the /tmp part as the start of the next input.

• Pressing the delete (interrupt) key moves the cursor to the end of the input.

• An oddity of rio whereby the cursor would often disappear below the bottom of the window is fixed.

Attributed text

Windows can display attributed text. The attributes are set by detecting standard CSI set-attribute escape sequences (ESC followed by a ‘[’, then a parameter number, and an ‘m’). The following numbers are recognized :-

• 0 Reset all attributes
• 1 Bold font on
• 3 Italic font on
• 4 Underline on
• 7 Inverse on (ie swap background and foreground colour)
• 8 Invisible on
• 9 Crossed on
• 22 Bold off
• 23 Italic off
• 24 Underline off
• 27 Inverse off
• 28 Invisible off
• 29 Crossed off
• 30 Black foreground
• 31 Red foreground
• 32 Green foreground
• 33 Yellow foreground
• 34 Blue foreground
• 35 Magenta foreground
• 36 Cyan foreground
• 37 White foreground (actually shown as grey)
• 39 Reset foreground to default
• 40 Black background
• 41 Red background
• 42 Green background
• 43 Yellow background
• 44 Blue background
• 45 Magenta background
• 46 Cyan background
• 47 White background (actually shown as grey)
• 49 Reset background to default

Here is a replacement for ls, called just l, which uses colours to show directories and executable files.

Download l.c

Unlike ls, this program does its own column formatting, and can also list directories recursively. A useful rc function to use with it is :-

fn ll { l -l $* }

Fonts

Bold, italic and bold/italic fonts can be configured by setting the fontb, fonti and fontbi environment variables respectively. Otherwise, bold font defaults to the regular font, italic to bold and bold/italic to italic.

The following settings give quite good results :-

font=/lib/font/bit/pelm/euro.8.font
fontb=/lib/font/bit/fixed/unicode.8x13B.font
fonti=/lib/font/bit/fixed/unicode.8x13O.font

Test file

Here is a simple text file which tests colours and fonts. With the above font settings it gives the following output.

Window commands

The following additional commands can be written to a window’s wctl file.

• grabpointer The window will receive all future mouse events
• ungrabpointer Cancels the effect of grabpointer
• grabkeyboard The window will receive all future keyboard events
• ungrabkeyboard Cancels the effect of grabkeyboard
• close Sends a mouse event with character code ‘c’ to the window. (See below).
• refresh Redraw the window
• select If the window is selected, hide it; otherwise select it, unhiding it if necessary.

Parameters

riox provides some additional parameters which can be used with the new and set window commands, and also with the attach parameter to mount.

• -mindx W Set the minimum allowed width (the window cannot be resized below this width).
• -maxdx W Set the maximum allowed width (the window cannot be resized above this width). Note that if mindx and maxdx are the same, then the window’s width is fixed.
• -mindy H Set the minimum allowed height.
• -maxdy H Set the maximum allowed height.
• -noborder Specify that the window has no border.
• -transientfor ID Make this window transient with respect to another window, indicated by the other’s window ID.
• -layer N Set the layer. Windows in a layer stay above windows in a lower layer. N may be negative; the default layer is zero.

Window files

The following extra files are available in the window directory.

hist

This file contains a listing of the command line history. The following rc function is useful :-

fn hist { cat $wdir/hist }

wdir

This read-only file reports the current directory of the process with the pid set with the -pid option when the window was created, or riox’s current directory if no -pid was specified. It does this by reading the /proc directory.

This file is present in rio, but as a simple read-write file. rio relies on rc setting its value, by writing to /dev/wdir each time a cd is run - see its simple.c source file. The problem with this is that /dev/wdir isn’t always the right file to write to (for example in a window running rc, but sharing the namespace of another window). Also an interactive sub-shell won’t reset wdir when it exits. And finally, if you’re using /bin/sh, it won’t keep wdir in synch at all.

The value of wdir is potentially useful for distinguishing different shell windows, and is used internally for the ^F file completion facility in text windows.

screeninfo

This file contains six integers. The first two give the mouse position, the next two give the location of the top left of the image riox is running in, and the final two give the location of the bottom right of the image.

logctl

This is a write-only file which controls a simple logging facility. Writing open <filename> truncates or creates the given file, and thereafter writes to it everything that is read from or written to the cons file. Logging is finished by writing close. The result should be a transcript of the session.

Note that, since the log file is opened by riox, the filename is resolved relative to riox’s working directory and namespace.

Here is a script file which uses the log facility to emulate the unix script program :-

Download script

#!/bin/rc
rfork e
d=`{date}
if (~ $1 -d) {
   echo 'Script done on '^$"d
   echo -n close >$wdir/logctl
}
if not {
   if (~ $#* 0) f=typescript
   if not f=$1
   # Make f an absolute filename
   if (! ~ $f /*) f=`{pwd}^/$f
   echo Opening log file $f
   if (echo -n 'open '^$f >$wdir/logctl)
      echo 'Script started on '^$"d
}

Use script with an optional filename (the default is “typescript”) to begin, and script -d to finish.

wininfo

This file begins with four integers giving the position and size of the window. After that, the file contains some strings, separated by spaces, as follows :-

• hidden if the window is hidden
• current if the window has the focus
• noborder if the window has no border
• layer:N if the window is in a layer other than 0
• transientfor:ID if the window is transient with respect to another window
• pid:ID if the window has a -pid specified
• mindx:W if the window has a minimum width set
• maxdx:W if the window has a maximum width set
• mindy:H if the window has a minimum height set
• maxdy:H if the window has a maximum height set

Additional mouse events

The following additional mouse events are sent to the reader of the mouse file. The messages follow the same format as the m and r events, but have a different letter code.

• c a close event, requesting that the window in question close; but it is entirely up to the application whether it does so.
• x an exit event, indicating that the mouse has left the window.
• e an enter event, indicating that the mouse has entered the window.
• l a limited event, indicating that the requested move or resize command did not change the window due to the min/max limits in place.
• f a focus in event, indicating the window has gained the input focus.
• g a focus out event, indicating the window has lost the input focus.

Download

Riox is part of the Plan 9 branch of Object Icon, and is built along with the rest of Object Icon, with the riox executable ending up in the bin directory. For details, see this page.

However, since riox is a useful standalone program, a separate archive file is provided, which just contains the riox source code. This can be found here.

To build, just cd into the extracted directory and run mk. This should build riox, the ls replacement mentioned above (l), and the script shell script, also mentioned above. These executables can then be copied to convenient locations on your $path.