I wrote 9ne over a year ago. Initially I just did it to do it, but then I was going to show it off at a special conference – that didn’t pan out. I was going to make an online IDE with it as the central piece, but alas I’ve been too busy with paying work. So it’s been sitting there somewhat dormant.

It’s a shame because it has a lot of functionality and potential. It’s either ahead of its time, or completely pointless – I am not sure which. I am hearing rumors that there is now a vi clone floating around on the net now too, so maybe it was ahead of its time, and still has some usefulness.

I am releasing it under the GPL. You can download the source code… well there is actually a bit of a catch with the download…

9ne is now in a git repository. I wanted to learn git, which is a distributed source control system used for the Linux kernel and über slick with branching, so I moved the whole project to git.

One nice thing about git is because it’s distributed you can just put a packed repository on a normal web server and people can check out the code – it’s actually clone the repository, but you get the code either way.

So if you want the code, you’ll have to use git (or find someone who will use git for you). If you’re on Mac or Linux, you can get git by doing:

$ curl http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.5.0.5.tar.gz -O
$ gunzip git-1.5.0.5.tar.gz ; tar -xvf git-1.5.0.5.tar; cd git-1.5.0.5
$ make configure 
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
$ make all 
$ sudo make install

(thanks to steve dekorte on getting git)

Then to clone the 9ne code (aka checkout a repository):

$ cd my_projects_folder
$ git clone http://robrohan.com/projects/9ne/repo/9ne.git/

There is a quick, basic tutorial on git on the git site. The thing to note about git, aside from it being distributed, is it excels at branching and merging.

If you dig git, and want to make your own repository available over http (and for my own reference so I don’t lose it), do:

$ git repack -d                                # compress
$ git clone --bare -l . /tmp/your-proj.git     # export
$ git --bare --git-dir=/tmp/your-proj.git update-server-info 

(from a publishing tutorial).

Ok, so this was a bit of a double post. Git is cool, 9ne is now open source, and you can git the source if you want. (that was a horrible joke)

Update: If you are building git on Ubuntu 7 make sure you have the following apt-get install’ed: build-essential, libcurl3-dev, zlib1g-dev, libssl-dev, and libexpat1-dev.