Whipping up a new Shell – Lash#Cat9

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 b… | Continue reading


@arcan-fe.com | 2 years ago

Arcan is a framework for creating anything

Arcan is a powerful development framework for creating virtually anything between user interfaces for specialised embedded applications all the way to full-blown standalone desktop environments. Bo… | Continue reading


@arcan-fe.com | 2 years ago

Arcan 0.6.2 – It’s all connected

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… | Continue reading


@arcan-fe.com | 2 years ago

The Day of a New Command-Line Interface: Shell

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 … | Continue reading


@arcan-fe.com | 2 years ago

Arcan as Operating System Design

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… | Continue reading


@arcan-fe.com | 3 years ago

Arcan 0.6 – ‘M’ – Start Networking

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 progre… | Continue reading


@arcan-fe.com | 3 years ago

A12 – Advancing Network Transparency on the Desktop

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… | Continue reading


@arcan-fe.com | 4 years ago

Leveraging the “Display Server” to Improve Debugging

I spend most of my time digging through software-in-execution rather than software-at-rest (e.g. source code). Sometimes the subject of study is malware hissing like a snake and lashing out at the … | Continue reading


@arcan-fe.com | 4 years ago

One night in Rio: Vacation photos from Plan 9 (2017)

This post is about experimenting with imitating and extending the window management concepts from the venerable Plan9, Rio. The backstory and motivation is simply that I’ve had the need for a… | Continue reading


@arcan-fe.com | 4 years ago

The Dawn of a New Command Line Interface (2017)

disclaimer: this is a technical post aimed at developers being somewhat aware of the problem space. There will be a concluding ‘the day of…’ post aimed at end users where some of … | Continue reading


@arcan-fe.com | 4 years ago

Chasing the dream of a terminal-free CLI

TLDR; Crazy person is trying to do something about how nightmarishly bad the interface between you and the command-line/command-line utilities really is, i.e. getting rid of terminal protocols.   T… | Continue reading


@arcan-fe.com | 4 years ago

Towards Secure System Graphics: Arcan and OpenBSD

Let me preface this by saying that this is a (very) long and medium-rare technical article about the security considerations and minutiae of porting (most of) the Arcan ecosystem to work under Open… | Continue reading


@arcan-fe.com | 5 years ago

Safespaces: An Open Source VR Desktop

In this post, I will go through the current stages of work on a 3D and (optionally) VR desktop for the Arcan display server. It is tentatively called safespaces (Github link) as an ironic remark on… | Continue reading


@arcan-fe.com | 5 years ago

The X Network Transparency Myth

This article presents an interpretation of the history surrounding the ability for X clients to interact with X servers running on other machines, recent arguments as to that ability being defunct … | Continue reading


@arcan-fe.com | 6 years ago

Writing a console replacement using Arcan

In this article, I will show just how little effort that it takes to specify graphics and window management sufficient enough to provide features that surpass kmscon and the ‘regular’ l… | Continue reading


@arcan-fe.com | 6 years ago

Arcan vs. Xorg – Approaching Feature Parity

This is the first article out of three in a series where I will go through what I consider to be the relevant Xorg feature set, and compare it, point by point, to how the corresponding solution or … | Continue reading


@arcan-fe.com | 6 years ago

Revisiting the Arcan (“Desktop Engine”) Project

Two years has passed since the public presentation where Arcan and its ecosystem of side projects and tools started to creep out of the woodworks; although the project had been alive and worked on … | Continue reading


@arcan-fe.com | 6 years ago