What is wily?
See the introduction.
What does "wilydiag: File exists: can't open fifo" mean?
Wily opens and listens on a fifo in /tmpin case some program
tries to communicate with it. If you're not doing anything
tricky like that, it won't get used at all. Ordinarily wily
cleans the fifo up when it exits, but if something dire happens
Wily may not get a chance to clean up. The fifo will be named
$WILYFIFO if that is defined, otherwise /tmp/wilyUSER$DISPLAY,
where USER is your login name. Just remove it and restart wily
to be able to use wily messages.
Why does my compiler/editor/whatever complain about illegal
characters? The line looks fine to me."
Chances are that you've managed to enter a control character
accidentally, and the font you're using doesn't display control
characters. The easiest way to check is to select the line (or other
text) that's causing the complaint, and click on "|cat -v" (or some
other program that can display control characters, such as vis or od). I
find ^A the most common offender.
Why does Wily have to do its own window management?
See a long explanation
Funky B3 expansion allows some letters, not others?
To quote rob (it was originally rob's comment, wasn't it?): "Hard to
get absolutely right." The problem is that you can have pretty much
everything in a filename apart from \0, but usually you want it to
pick sensible strings. It's not just filenames, after all, but also
identifiers in programs. After all, Acme is primarily a programmer's
tool, because there aren't any other kinds of Plan 9 user. :-) Plus,
most of them are shell metacharacters (in rc).
The set you want to match varies from instance to instance, so
it's pretty much an arbitrary choice. Sometimes you lose. Some
justification would be good for the docs, though. Anyone know
why "*" is considered a valid character? Hmmm. Ones not in the
above list are "#$^*_-:~,./". Of these, "~./" are parts of
common filenames (~steve/x.c), "#$-:,." are part of the syntax
for expressing an Acme address, and "_" is a common identifier
character. That just leaves "^*". I suspect these are allowed
because they're commonly used as part of a regexp search.
Steve Kilbane
Why does it take so long to load my [mumble]-meg file?
Blame steve.
What about a Win 3.1/95/NT port?
Gary's not likely to do it because he doesn't have
a development environment for Win (or know much
about the Win environment (or want to))
It may not be as useful under windows as under Unix
because you won't have the same command-line toolbox
(sed, grep, glimpse, ...)
There's a Win version of sam, which presumably means
there's a Win version of libg (libg.dll?). Starting from
that would probably make the port much easier.