Intro to tools philosophy for windows users
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Anpe (66.26.59.232)
#Coming from the windows world people tend to get used to big
#programs that do everything, using word or excel makes you feel like
#your program should do everything, a word processor should format,
#spell check and print your files; a spreadsheet should do all the
#sorting, mathematical functions and graphing.
#
#Plan 9 and its Unix ancestors don't work like this. Programs in Plan
#9 are meant to have one use and one use only. Plan 9 doesn't have
#word processors, instead you write the text using a text
#editor(liked ed(1), acme(1) or sam(1)), format it with fmt(1) and if
#you want to turn it into a form that's document quality insert ms(6)
#macros.
#
#excel requires a bit more understanding, spreadsheets are
#represented as flat files, you can manipulate these files,
#summations, equations etc. with a programming language called awk(1)
#which specializes in manipulating structured text. Once manipulated
#you can graph data with a graphing program called graph(1)
#manipulation on fields isneed to use graph(1) if you want to write
#to the screen or grap(1) if you want to make troff graphs to include
#in your documents.
#
#But if you were just limited to mimicing the functionality of
#windows Plan 9 would only be a cumbersome equivalent. The real joy
#of Plan 9 is the ability of each of these programs to interact with
#each other, since everything is flat text