Haiku

I tried to write this whole post in haiku, but it just kept getting more difficult.  Plus, I would have had to cheat and split sentences between haiku.  You may notice that this next paragraph is worded so it will split up into groups of 5 syllables, 7 syllables, and 5 syllables again, but partway through the paragraph it stops abruptly mid-sentence.  Deal with it.

I started browsing Wikipedia on a mathematical article about Euler's identity, and just through clicking links ended up on the article about BeOS, and then found Haiku.  What is it?  Well, it's an open-source OS that's inspired by BeOS.  Its aim is to be a fast, simple, and easy OS to use.  It's similar to most Unix-based OSes, but it's its own entire thing.  It's also in the alpha stage so far.  Regardless, they have an iso of alpha 2 available for download, so I grabbed it and set it up in VirtualBox.

The alpha status of it is very apparent from the moment you boot into your fresh install.  There are no user accounts, no login, and a limited yet diverse set of programs available.  That box in the upper right corner is its panel (basically the start menu and taskbar equivalent), entries get added as you run other things and go away when you close them.  I'm actually posting this from its web browser, WebPositive, so it's reasonably usable.

Note the lack of UTF-8 support in WebPositive.  Honya's blog title shows up as squares with an exclamation point at the end.  Strangely the star shows while the Japanese doesn't.  They mention on the site that there's a lack of support for this, and they suggest installing in English because of it.

One thing I miss while editing this post is Ctrl + the arrow keys to move the cursor by word.  The keyboard shortcuts for things are extremely different from anything I've ever used before, Backspace won't even go back a page in WebPositive.  In fact, the normal post editing shortcuts don't even work, i.e. I can't hit Ctrl + B with text selected to bold it.  It seems like Haiku uses Alt where everything else in existence uses Ctrl.

I can't hide the icons on the desktop.  Three of the default ones ("BeBook", "User Guide" and "Welcome") are symlinks to various bits of HTML documentation, so I chucked them in Home to reduce clutter a little bit, but the three remaining icons ("Haiku" (basically My Computer), "Home" (basically My Documents) and "Trash" (durr)) are unremovable.  I can, however, set them to be really tiny, as you see in the picture above.

You notice that word, "symlink", in the previous paragraph, right?  Yeah, now you do.  It operates much like a Unix-based operating system.  The terminal is bash.  There's nano, top, ssh/scp, and a ton of other *nix utilities.  It even comes with fortune, though it doesn't like the -o parameter.  I've customized the PS1 (it defaults to "\w> ") and the terminal colors, but everything else is default, including the username and hostname.

Its documentation makes sure to mention right away that it maintains compatibility with BeOS programs, so I guess I can browse around a bit and see what's available.  It has links to point you in the right direction.

I was quick to change its mouse behavior to focus windows on hover once I noticed it had the feature.  Even though TweakUI can do this in Windows, it has strange and unpredictable caveats, whereas it seems to Just Work™ in *nix-based GUIs.

Most of my complaints can be easily countered with "it's the second alpha release, what do you expect?" so they probably don't really carry any weight.  At least they know it's got a long way to go before becoming release quality.  Still, it's a start, and it's extremely usable for being the second alpha.

I only got it to crash and present an error dialog once while writing this post, and that was mostly due to something I'd done.  While poking around the filesystem I'd found /etc/profile, which is the script that gets run when you start the terminal.  It says in a comment at the top "place any user customizations in ~/.profile", so I did that to customize my PS1.  Except that I did it by copying the file, so it was essentially doing everything twice.  I guess it wasn't too happy about that.  Removed everything except my customization and it's worked fine ever since.

An oddity I've noticed is that any time I want to type a tilde, I have to press the key twice.  I think this is due to the keyboard layout it's using.  It defaults to US-International which provides all sorts of shortcuts for foreign characters.  Which sounds neat, but makes changing directories in the terminal weird.  Its keymap changing utility actually lets you disable these "dead keys", as they're called, and it also lets you swap its mapping of Alt and Ctrl so you can copy/paste with the Ctrl key instead of Alt.

The verdict: If it can only get better from here, we can only wait.  I like most of what I see.