I use acme(-sac) from plan9port as my primary interface to unixes (Windows). Specifically, I enjoy its ability to move quickly about the filesystem, edit files with a pipe through any shell command, and retain a state of the files and commands (via guide files) I access for a particular task. I'm transitioning from LaTeX to UTF8 text files for documents, especially my notebook: a few hundred "tagged" files I keep in a dropboxed directory. Acme makes entering UTF8 very easy by its lib/keyboard shortcuts (eg, Alt a e), and src/cmd/devdraw/mklatinkbd to change them, and by bin/unicode to figure out which characters are which. I love the plumber to start programs to process non-textual files.
I use rc/getflags/usage to write better shell scripts at home, and at work as an implementation layer beneath a ksh interface layer. I need ksh as an interface layer because you can't run a hashbang-rc script without PLAN9 set, and I can't guarantee any coworker has PLAN9 set, or $PLAN9/bin/9 in his path, or any desire to type /home/mydir/plan9/bin/9 before each of my scripts. I use the text processing and filesystem utilities as better versions of same. I use dc for all of my (especially scripted) calculating needs. I would like to use Mail instead of Outlook, if like nmh I can pull files from an Exchange server. I haven't really looked into this yet, but it could be a huge win. I know all this barely scratches the surface of what plan9(port) can do. Jason Catena
